This paper exploits the introduction of the National Minimum Wage (NMW) in Britain and subsequent increases in the NMW to identify the effects of minimum wages on productivity. We find that the NMW increased average labour costs for companies that tend to employ low paid workers, both upon the introduction of the NMW and more recently following the Great Recession when many workers experienced pay freezes or wage cuts, but the NMW continued to rise. We find evidence to suggest that companies responded to these increases in labour costs by raising labour productivity. These labour productivity changes did not come about via a reduction in firms' workforce or via capital-labour substitution. Rather they were associated with increases in total factor productivity, consistent with organisational change, training and efficiency wage responses to increased labour costs from minimum wages.

The Tribal Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (Tribal MIECHV) Program provides federal grants to tribes, tribal consortia, tribal organizations, and urban Indian organizations to implement evidence-based home-visiting services for American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) families. To date, only one evidence-based home-visiting program has been developed for use in AI/AN communities. The purpose of this article is to describe the steps that four Tribal MIECHV Programs took to assess community needs, select a home-visiting model, and culturally adapt the model for use in AI/AN communities. In these four unique Tribal MIECHV Program settings, each program employed a rigorous needs-assessment process and developed cultural modifications in accordance with community strengths and needs. Adaptations occurred in consultation with model developers, with consideration of the conceptual rationale for the program, while grounding new content in indigenous cultures. Research is needed to improve measurement of home-visiting outcomes in tribal and urban AI/AN settings, develop culturally grounded home-visiting interventions, and assess the effectiveness of home visiting in AI/AN communities.

Enlargement of the European Union in May 2004 was followed by an increase in migration from the poorest of the central and eastern European New Member States (NMS) to other Member States. We consider the macroeconomic impacts of these migration flows across Europe, highlighting impacts in receiving and sending countries. Copyright (c) 2010 National Institute of Economic and Social Research. Journal compilation (c) 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

A regression discontinuity approach is used to analyse the effect of the legislated increase in the UK national minimum wage that occurs at age 22 years on various labour market outcomes. Using data from the Labour Force Survey we find an increase of 3-4 percentage points in the rate of employment of low skilled individuals. Unemployment declines among men and inactivity among women. We find no such effect before the national minimum wage was introduced and no robust impacts at age 21 or 23 years. Our results are robust to a range of specification tests.

Introduction There is a perception that women are under-represented as speakers at emergency medicine (EM) conferences. We aimed to evaluate the ratio of male to female speakers and the proportion of presenting time by gender at major international EM conferences. Methods Conference programmes of the major English-speaking EM conferences occurring from 2014 to 2015 were obtained. The number of presentations, the gender of the speaker and the duration of each presentation were recorded. Results We analysed eight major EM conferences. These included 2382 presentations, of which 29.9% (range 22.5%-40.9%) were given by women. In total, 56 104 min of presentations were analysed, of which 27.6% (range 21%-36.7%) were delivered by women. On average, presentations by women were 95 s shorter than presentations by men (23 vs 21 min 25 s). Conclusions Male speakers exceed female speakers at major EM conferences. The reasons for this imbalance are likely complex and multifactorial and may reflect the gender imbalance within the specialty. BACKGROUND

A heterogeneous panel-based Bayesian model averaging approach is used to identify the robust economic and policy drivers of international migration to the UK from 14 different source regions over 1980-2007. Around three-quarters of the increase in net immigration over the last decade, which is particularly pronounced for selected source regions, is associated with structural change, which may be attributed to UK and foreign immigration policy. The remainder of the rise is largely explained by 'friends and family' effects. There are considerable uncertainties associated both with the effects of particular economic drivers of immigration and with forecasts of immigration.

Early work on the national minimum wage (NMW) suggested that policymakers in the UK had succeeded in raising the pay of low-paid workers without impairing their employment prospects. This paper shows that when we focus on the most vulnerable workers, part-time females, the NMW appears to be associated with reductions in employment retention. These negative impacts were evident when the NMW was introduced and also when it was increased faster than average wages in the mid-2000s. We also show that these falls in employment among part-time females are exacerbated by the recession.

The past 25 years have been characterised by a surge in international trade as economies have become increasingly inter-linked. In many advanced economies this surge has been associated with increased import competition from low-wage economies. This paper explores the effects of such competition on manufacturing jobs in the UK. We consider two developments that influenced the nature of international trade: the ascendency of China as an important player in global markets and the accession to the European Union of a number of Eastern European economies in 2004. Both of these changes were associated with a shift in trade regimes and led to a sharp rise in import competition in particular UK manufacturing sectors. We find that these changes are likely to have hastened the decline of UK manufacturing.