Richard Dickens

University of Sussex · Department of Economics

International comparisons of the development of AI have increasingly been made with the use of composite indexes. These aim to identify countries that are at the forefront of AI and those lagging behind. In this paper, we focus in particular on the talent component related to AI. We analyse a new dataset based on the Global Artificial Intelligence...

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...

This paper investigates the impact of immigration on the probability of being in social housing in the UK. In recent years immigrant households are slightly more likely than natives to be in social housing but once one controls for relevant household characteristics immigrants are significantly less likely to be in social housing than natives. Howe...

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 a...

The previous Labour government pledged to abolish child poverty and introduced a range of welfare reforms that emphasised the role of work as the primary route out of poverty. This culminated in the Child Poverty Act (2010) which commits all future governments to the abolition of child poverty. This paper examines New Labour's record on child pover...

A regression discontinuity approach is used to analyse the effect of the legislated increase in the UK National Minimum Wage (NMW) that occurs at age 22 on various labour market outcomes. Using data from the Labour Force Survey we find a 2-4% point increase in the employment rate of low skilled individuals. Unemployment declines among men and inact...

Report prepared for the Low Pay Commission Disclaimer: This work contains statistical data which is Crown Copyright; it has been made available by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) through the Low Pay Commission (LPC) and the UK Data Archive (UKDA) and has been used by permission. Neither the ONS, nor the LPC, nor the UKDA bear any responsib...

This paper examines changes in earnings inequality and mobility between 1978/9 and 2005/6 using a unique dataset that includes both those with secure patterns of employment and a wider group who experience periods without earnings. It finds significant increases in annual earnings inequality for both male and female employees. On most measures this...

This paper discusses the extent to which migrants to Britain have been assimilated into the workforce. Migration into Britain has increased over the last 25 years, with a big increase in inflows in recent years. The paper shows that when a migrant worker first arrives they experience a pay gap with native born counterparts of over 30% for men and 1...

There is a growing body of research that measures employment effects of the minimum wageby using longitudinal data on individuals to compare job loss of workers affected by aminimum wage increase with those who are not directly affected. This sort of study requiresgood quality wage data in order to clearly identify these treatment and control group...

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...

The UK National Minimum Wage (NMW) has had a minimal impact on UK wage inequality because it has been set at a modest level and because aggregate evidence suggests very small spill-over effects. But the small spill-over effects might be because of the small numbers of workers affected and widespread anticipation of the introduction of the NMW might...

The National Minimum Wage (NMW) that was introduced in April 1999 is sometimes paraded as evidence of the Blair government s commitment to reversing the rise in inequality that was characteristic of the last 25 years.

Child poverty rose sharply in Britain and the US in the period preceding the Blair and Clinton governments, so that over a third of children were in poverty in both countries. Demographic change, falls in work and increasing wage inequality all contributed to this rise in Britain, with benefit changes having an offsetting effect. In the US, demogra...

Relative child poverty rose sharply over the period 1979–97/98 and has since fallen by about half a million (4 percentage points). Absolute poverty changed little between 1979 and 1997/98 but has fallen sharply since then. Absolute poverty fell by 1.7 million between 1997/98 and 2001/02, with a half million fall in the last year alone. Changes in w...

The Low Pay Commission (LPC), acting on advice from the Office for National Statistics, initially estimated that some 1.9 million workers (8.5 per cent of employees) would have their pay raised by the introduction of the National Minimum Wage (NMW). In the light of data problems this has been revised downwards a number of times and now stands at 1....

Because a fair society and the strongest possible economy depend upon leaving no one behind, Britain must build on the reforms taking nearly one million children out of poverty and give every child the best possible start in life. So our [fourth] ambition is - by the end of the next decade - child poverty reduced by half - on our way to ending chil...

Paper prepared for the Low Pay Commission.

Scholars emphasize that poverty in Britain has risen sharply since the late 1970s. Meanwhile in the United States, both official figures and traditional poverty scholars report sharp declines in poverty. We seek to provide a comparison of poverty levels in Britain and the US based on a set of common definitions. We then proceed to ask what factors—...

I study the dynamic structure of male wages in Great Britain using the New Earnings Survey Panel from 1975-95. Computing auto-covariances of individual wages by cohort I find evidence of a permanent component of earnings that increases over the life cycle and a highly persistent, serially correlated transitory component. In addition, the estimated...

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...

The recent run of good macroeconomic news masks mounting evidence that worklessness is increasingly concentrated on selected individuals, households, and socio-economic groups and in geographical areas. These distributional aspects have been overlooked or ignored over the last 20 years, but we believe they now form the most pressing labour-market a...

Recent work on the economic effects of minimum wages has stressed that the standard economic model, where increases in minimum wages depress employment, is not supported by empirical work in some labor markets. The authors present a general theoretical model whereby employers have some degree of monopsony power, which allows minimum wages to have t...

In two papers Meyer and Wise [Meyer, R., Wise, D., 1983a. The effects of the minimum wage on the employment and earnings of youth. Journal of Labor Economics 1, 66–100. Meyer, R., Wise, D., 1983b. Discontinuous distributions and missing persons: The minimum wage and unemployed youth. Econometrica 61, 1677–1698.] present an ingenious method for esti...

In two papers, Meyer and Wise (1983a,b) present an ingenious method for estimating the effect of minimum wage rates on wages and employment using data based only on the observed cross-sectional distribution of wages. They, and others who have used this method, have generally found that the minimum wage causes substantial losses in employment. In th...

In this paper I study wage mobility in Great Britain using the New Earnings Survey from 1975-1994 and the British Household Panel Survey from 1991-1994. Measuring mobility in terms of docile 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 l...

In this paper I study the changing dynamic structure of male wages in Great Britain using the New Earnings Survey Panel form 1974-1994. 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 tran...

Since the abolition of the Wages Councils in September 1993, agriculture is the only sector in the UK economy covered by any form of minimum wage legislation. This paper investigates the impact of the system of minimum wages on the level and structure of earnings in agriculture and the level and structure of employment. On wages, our main conclusio...

Recent work on the economic effects of minimum wages has stressed that the standard economic model, where increases in minimum wages depress employment, is not supported by the empirical findings in some labour markets. In this paper we present a theoretical framework which is general enough to allow minimum wages to have the conventional negative...

Presents a theoretical approach to analysing the effects of minimum wages on employment which is intended to conform more with the functioning of actual labour markets than do other popular models traditionally used to analyse the likely effects of minimum wages on employment. The model has the desirable property of not only allowing for the negati...

The 1993 Trade Union Reform and Employment Rights Act removed the remaining minimum wage protection for some 2.5 million low paid workers by abolishing the last 26 UK Wages Councils. The Government's case for abolition rested on three key arguments: (1) minimum wages do little to alleviate poverty since most covered workers do not live in poor hous...

This paper focuses on the estimation and testing of equivalence scales in the context of a demand system with nonline ar logarithmic expenditure effects in its budget-share equations. The authors show that such nonlinearity enables one to identify the scal es without demographic separability restrictions on preferences and to avoid false rejection...

Richard Dickens and Abigail McKnight explore changes in earnings inequality in Britain since the late 1970s.