We analyse productivity growth in UK manufacturing 1980‐92 using the newly available ARD panel of establishments drawn from the Census of Production. We examine the contribution to productivity growth of ‘internal’ restructuring (such as new technology and organisational change among survivors) and ‘external’ restructuring (exit, entry and market share change). We find that (a) ‘external restructuring’ accounts for 50% of establishment labour productivity growth and 80–90% of establishment TFP growth; (b) much of the external restructuring effect comes from multi‐establishment firms closing down poorly‐performing plants and opening high‐performing new ones, and (c) external competition is an important determinant of internal restructuring.

We examine the role of ill-health in retirement decisions in Britain, using the first eight waves of the British Household Panel Survey . As self-reported health status is likely to be endogenous to the retirement decision, we instrument self-reported health by a constructed 'health stock' measure using a set of health indicator variables and personal characteristics, as suggested by . Using both linear and non-linear fixed effects estimators, we show that adverse individual health shocks are an important predictor of individual retirement behaviour. We compare the impact of our constructed health measure on economic activity with that arising from the use of other health variables in the data set. We also examine the impact of the 1995 reform of disability benefits on the retirement decision. Key WordsIll health Retirement Disability insurance JEL classification H55 I12 J26 AcknowledgementsWe are grateful to the Nuffield Foundation for funding the project: 'A study of health and the labour market behaviour of older workers', and to Sharon Witherspoon in particular. Executive SummaryThis paper examines the role of ill-health in retirement decisions in Britain, using the first eight waves of the British Household Panel Survey . To tackle the problem that self-reported health status is likely to be endogenous to the retirement decision, a two-stage method, as suggested by , is adopted. The first stage is to construct a 'health stock' measure that is cleansed of the effects of reporting behaviour reflecting labour market participation. This measure is then introduced into a reduced form model of labour market (in)activity. At this latter stage, modelling how labour market transitions are related to time variation in health and other characteristics, helps to eliminate any unchanging person-specific association between characteristics and the decision to work.The 'health-stock' measure is constructed by regressing self-reported health on a set of more objective health indicator variables and a set of other personal characteristics.Few personal characteristics, other than those related to health, are found to be significant in explaining self-assessed health. Many of the health indicators are significant in the model, and as expected having health problems is associated with reporting poor health.The panel structure of the data set is exploited to estimate a non-linear 'fixedeffects' model that allows an exploration of how time variation in various characteristics relates to transitions out of (and in to) work. Deterioration in an individual's health is found to be strongly positively associated with movement out of work. Sensitivity analyses suggest that there may be some asymmetry between the respective effects of health deteriorations and improvements on transitions out of, and in to, work.The final section briefly considers a reform to the public disability insurance programme in 1995, which both tightened formal eligibility conditions and reduced the economic incentives to retire via the disability insu...

We study entry, exit and survival of UK manufacturing establishments from 1986 to 1991 using the newly released ARD database. We document patterns of entry and exit across industries and over time. We estimate an augmented Cox proportional hazard to examine the survival of new plants in the UK in this period. We ¢nd interactions between survival, size and age of establishment that di¡er between establishments that are singles and part of a group. We speculate that this ¢nding may be consistent with market selection models based on learning.

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We examine the impact of housing capital gains on savings behaviour during the 1990s British housing market cycle using microdata from the British Household Panel Survey and county-level house price data. We condition the models on household real financial capital gains using Family Resources Survey data. We find a marginal propensity to consume out of housing wealth of between 0.01 and 0.03, depending on specification. Among our novel findings are asymmetric behaviour between periods of house price rises and falls, with stronger consumption response during periods of house price increases, and a disproportionate impact on saving if the household has negative housing equity.

"Many studies describe the potentially adverse impact on employment of the payroll costs of financing public pension programmes. Conventionally, empirical studies treat contributions to public pension programmes as a pure tax (in, for example, calculations of the tax wedge by OECD). But this approach ignores any future rights to benefits that are perceived by contributors. In fact, public pension programmes contain both an 'actuarial' and a 'redistributive' component - the former closer to saving, the latter a tax. The paper constructs indicators of the tax component of pension programmes, both between and within generations, across a range of OECD countries and time periods. It uses these measures in a cross-country panel analysis of the determinants of age and gender-specific economic activity rates. The results reveal robust evidence that when public pension programme contributions are broken down into a tax component and a savings component, the tax component of the payroll contribution reduces economic activity rates among women while a higher retirement saving component has the opposite effect. There is little evidence that average tax rates, however constructed, have any adverse impact on the economic activity rates of men." Copyright � Blackwell Publishing 2004.

This paper uses microeconomic data from the British Household Panel and General Household Surveys to describe how the distribution of pay differs between the public and private sectors in 1983 and in the early 1990s. Separate analyses by gender and education group reveal that it is women and those with intermediate-level qualifications who do best in the public sector. The large differences between the shapes of the conditional (that is, holding age and education constant) distributions of wages in the public and private sectors are demonstrated using quantile regressions estimated separately for each education group. The paper also exploits the longitudinal structure of the data used to assess how much of these differences can be explained by the unobserved characteristics of individuals.JEL classifications: J31, J45.