Documents Singleton, Carl 6 results

"Using a dataset covering a large sample of employees and their mostly very large employers, we study the dynamics of British wage inequality over the past two decades. Contrary to other studies, we find little evidence that recent increases in inequality have been driven by differences in the average wages paid by firms. Instead greater dispersion within firms can account for the majority of changes to the wage distribution. After controlling for the changing occupational content of employee wages, the role of average firm residual differences is approximately zero; the modestly increasing trend in between-firm wage inequality is explained by a combination of changes in between-occupation inequality and the occupational specialisation of firms. It is possible that previous studies, which assign some of the importance of changes in the between-firm component to industry, have misrepresented a significant role for occupations. These results are robust across measures of hourly, weekly and annual wages."

"Using employer-employee panel data, we provide novel facts on how real wages and working hours within jobs responded to the UK's Great Recession. In contrast to previous studies, our data enables us to address the cyclical composition of jobs. We show that firms were able to respond to the Great Recession with substantial real wage cuts and by recruiting more part-time workers. A one percentage point increase in the unemployment rate led to an average decline in real hourly wages of 2.8 per cent for new hires and 2.6 per cent for job stayers. Hours of new hires in entry-level jobs were also substantially procyclical, while job-stayer hours were nearly constant. Our findings suggest that models assuming rigid labour costs of new hires are not helpful for understanding the behaviour of unemployment over the business cycle."

"We use representative employer payroll data from Great Britain and the period 2006-2018 to document novel facts about nominal wage adjustments, focusing on workers who stay in the same firm and job from one year to the next. The richness of these data allows us to analyse separately basic pay and the other components of earnings, such as overtime and incentive pay, while controlling for hours worked. Weekly and hourly basic pay show signs of downward nominal rigidity, but non-basic pay components adjust more commonly. Unusually, these payroll-based data also report the pay rates of hourly-paid employees. A quarter of these workers, who stay in the same job between years, typically see no change in their rate of pay, and very few experience wage cuts. Finally, we exploit the employer-employee link in our data and find some evidence that wage setting is state-dependent rather than time-dependent."

" This study reports novel facts about the UK gender pay gap. We use a representative, longitudinal and linked employer–employee dataset for 2002–2016. Men's average log hourly wage was 22 points higher than women's in this period. We find that 16 per cent of this raw pay gap is accounted for by estimated firm‐specific wage effects. This is almost three times the amount explained by gender occupation differences. When we decompose a pre‐adjusted measure of the pay gap, we find less than 1 percentage point or a 6 per cent share is accounted for by the gender allocation across high‐ and low‐wage firms. In other words, only a small share of what is traditionally referred to as the ‘unexplained' part of the pay gap is explained by the differences between men and women in whom they work for."

"Using over four decades of British micro data, this article looks at how the narrowing gender employment gap stalled in the early 1990s. Changes to the structure of employment between and within industry sectors impacted the gap at approximately constant rates throughout the period and do not account for the stall. Instead, changes to how women's likelihood of paid work was affected by their partners' characteristics explain most of the gap's shift in trend. Increases in women's employment when they had children or achieved higher qualifications continued to narrow the gap even after it had stalled overall. "

"The Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE) is based on an annual one per cent sample of employee jobs and provides many of the UK's official earnings statistics. These statistics are generated using official weights designed to make the achieved sample in each year representative of the population of employee jobs in Britain by gender, age, occupation, and region. However, we find that jobs in small, young, private-sector organisations remain under-represented after weighting. Additionally, there is evidence of systematic year-to-year longitudinal attrition among employees who remain in scope, for which no official weighting adjustment exists. We develop new weights to address these issues, demonstrating their importance through policy-relevant examples. Our new estimates suggest that the bite of the National Living Wage is greater, and that progress toward the target for eradicating low pay has been faster, than previously understood."