Explore the vast range of titles available.

In the UK the gender pay gap on entry to the labour market is approximately zero but ten years after labour market entry, there is a gender wage gap of almost 25 log points. This article explores the reason for this gender gap in early-career wage growth, considering three main hypotheses - human capital, job-shopping and 'psychological' theories. Human capital factors can explain about 11 log points, job-shopping about 1.5 log points and the psychological theories up to 4.5 log points depending on the specification. But a substantial unexplained gap remains: women who have continuous full-time employment, have had no children and express no desire to have them earn about 8 log points less than equivalent men after 10 years in the labour market.

This paper estimates the impact of the introduction of the UK minimum wage on the working hours of low-wage employees using difference-in-differences estimators. The estimates using the employer-based New Earnings Surveys indicate that the introduction of the minimum wage reduced the basic hours of low-wage workers by between one and two hours per week. The effects on total paid hours are similar (indicating negligible effects on paid overtime), and lagged effects dominate the smaller and less significant initial effects within this. Estimates using the employee-based Labour Force Surveys are typically less significant.

This paper investigates constraints on desired hours of work using information on hours preferences from the British Household Panel Survey for 1991. Over a third of male manual workers would prefer to work fewer hours at the prevailing wage than they do and we estimate that on average desired hours per week are 4.3 lower than actual hours. We hypothesise that job insecurity and scarcity of alternative job opportunities enable employers to set hours constraints above employee preferences and find that the minimum hours constraints set by firms are an increasing function of the unemployment rate an individual faces.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to assess the role of local labour market conditions and pupil educational attainment as primary determinants of the post-compulsory schooling decision. Design/methodology/approach Through the specification of a nested logit model, the restrictive independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA) assumption inherent in the multinomial logit (MNL) model is relaxed across multiple unordered outcomes. Findings The analysis shows that the factors influencing schooling decisions differ for males and females. For females, on average, the key drivers of the schooling decision are expected wage returns based on youth educational attainment, attitudes to school and parental aspirations, rather than local labour market conditions. For males, higher local unemployment rates encourage greater investment in education. Originality/value The contribution of this paper to the existing literature is threefold. First, a nested logit model is proposed as an alternative to a MNL. The former can formally incorporate the structured and sequential decision-making process that youths may engage with in relation to the post-compulsory schooling decision, as well as relaxing the restrictive IIA assumption inherent in the MNL across multiple unordered outcomes, an issue the authors discuss in more detail in the Methodology section below. Second, the analysis is based on extremely rich socio-economic data from the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England, matched to local labour market data and administrative data from the National Pupil Database and Pupil Level Annual School Census, which provide a broad set of unusually high-quality measures of prior attainment. The authors argue that such high-quality data and an appropriate model specification allows identification of the determinants of the post-compulsory decision in a more detailed manner than many previous analyses. Third, the data have the scale necessary to consider whether the determinants of post-compulsory schooling decisions vary by gender, a particularly important issue given the differential education participation rates of males and females (e.g. in this cohort, females are about 10 percentage points more likely to go on to higher education in the UK than males), and the gendered choices of occupation (see, e.g. Bertrand, 2011). The work will, therefore, provide recent empirical evidence from England on gender differences in the determinants of education choices.

This paper models low pay transitions in Britain using a bivariate probit model with endogenous selection to address the `initial conditions' problem and parental variables as instruments. The exogeneity of the initial state is strongly rejected and results in considerable overstatement of the effects of explanatory factors. The probability of being low paid depends strongly on low pay in the previous year. Restricting attention to those who remain employees results in an overstatement of the probability of the low paid moving up the earnings distribution, but is not found to have much effect on the estimated effects of explanatory variables.

This chapter begins by summarising the policy and legislation changes that impacted female employment outcomes. It focuses on the changes in the labour market outcomes between female and male workers through a range of employment and wage measures and the possible factors that contribute to the gap. The chapter further investigates how the recent recession affected female employment.

Low-Wage Employment in Europe, edited by Stephen Bazen, Mary Gregory and Wiemer Salverda, is reviewed.