In this paper I study the changing dynamic structure of male wages in Great Britain using the New Earnings Survey Panel from 1975-94. Computing the covariance structure of individual wages by cohort I find evidence of a substantial permanent component of earnings that increases over the life cycle and a highly persistent, serially correlated transitory component. In addition, the estimated variances of both the permanent and transitory components have risen over this period, each explaining about half the rise in inequality. These results imply that the observed cross sectional rise in inequality is reflective of largely permanent differences between individuals that have grown over the last decade or so.
Mortgage credit expansion policies-such as UK's Help to Buy (HtB)-aim to increase access to and affordability of owner-occupied housing and are widespread around the world. We take advantage of spatial discontinuities in the HtB equity loan scheme, introduced in 2013, to explore the causal economic impacts and the effectiveness of this type of policies. Employing a Difference-in-Discontinuities design, we find that HtB increased house prices by more than the expected present value of the implied interest rate subsidy and had no discernible effect on construction volumes in the Greater London Authority (GLA), where housing supply is subject to severe long-run constraints and housing is already extremely unaffordable. HtB did increase construction numbers without affecting prices near the English/Welsh border, an area with less binding supply constraints and comparably affordable housing. HtB also led to bunching of newly built units below the price threshold, building of smaller new units and an improvement in the financial performance of developers. We conclude that credit expansion policies such as HtB may be ineffective in tightly supply constrained and already unaffordable areas.
The paper investigates the effect on the wage distribution of the introduction, in April 1999, of the national minimum wage (NMW) in the UK. Because of the structure of UK earnings statistics, it is not straightforward to investigate this and various methods for adjusting the published statistics are discussed. The main conclusions are that the NMW does have a detectable effect on the wage distribution and that compliance with the NMW is widespread but the effect is limited because the NMW has been set at a level such that only 6-7% of workers are directly affected and the NMW has had virtually no effect on the pay of workers who are not directly affected. Furthermore, virtually all the changes occurred within 2 months of the introduction in April 1999 and its effect declined over time from April 1999 to September 2001 as the minimum wage was not uprated in line with the increase in average earnings. The more substantial increase in the NMW in October 2001 partially, but not wholly, restored some of this decline in impact. Copyright 2004 Royal Statistical Society.
In this paper I study wage mobility in Great Britain using the New Earnings Surveys of 1975-94 and the British Household Panel Surveys of 1991-94. Measuring mobility in terms of decile transition matrices, I find a considerable degree of immobility within the wage distribution from one year to the next. Mobility is higher when measured over longer time periods. Those in lower deciles in the wage distribution are much more likely to exit into unemployment and non-employment. Measuring mobility by studying changes in individuals' actual percentile rankings in the wage distribution, I find evidence that short-run mobility rates have fallen since the late 1970s. This has potentially important welfare implications, given the rise in cross-section earnings inequality observed over the last two decades. 1 . . . there is no evidence here that large numbers of people are trapped on low earnings which are falling over time, nor that large numbers of people are trapped permanently in unemployment. The greater inequality seen in snapshot studies has more to do with greater mobility across a range of earnings in and out of work.Press release from the
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