Labour mobility and earnings in the UK, 1992-2017

Publication type

Journal Article

Authors

Publication date

November 15, 2023

Summary:

We combine information from the British Household Panel Study and the United Kingdom Household Longitudinal Study (also known as Understanding Society) to construct consistent time series of aggregate worker stocks, worker flows and earnings in the United Kingdom over the period 1992–2017. We propose a method to harmonise data between the British Household Panel Study and United Kingdom Household Longitudinal Study, which we validate by checking the consistency of some of our headline time series with equivalent series produced from other sources, notably by the Office for National Statistics. In addition to drawing a detailed aggregate picture of the United Kingdom labour market over the past two and a half decades, we use our constructed data set to compare the impact of industry, occupation and employer tenure on wages in the United Kingdom. We find that returns to occupation tenure are substantial. All else equal, five years of occupation tenure are associated with a 3.3% increase in wages. We also find that industry tenure plays a non-negligible part in driving wage growth.

Published in

Economic Journal

Volume and page numbers

Volume: 133 , p.3 -3

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1093/ej/uead052

ISSN

130133

Subjects

Notes

Open Access

© The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal Economic Society.

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.


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