What can wages and employment tell us about the UK's productivity puzzle?

By Richard Blundell, Claire E. Crawford, W. Jin. 2013

133 citations recorded by the source corpus.

As in many European countries, labour productivity in the UK has been stagnant since the start of the Great Recession. This article uses individual data on employment and wages to try to understand whether real wage flexibility can help shed light on the UK's productivity puzzle. It finds, perhaps unsurprisingly, that workforce composition cannot explain the reduction in wages and hence productivity that we observe, even compared to previous recessions; instead, real wages have fallen significantly within jobs this time round. Why? One possibility we investigate is that the labour supply in the UK is higher compared to previous recessions.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, General Health Professions

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/44d225e38a0fdd0956d33a47f503cdb0563ff6c1

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In Economics and Econometrics

In General Health Professions

Citations in the corpus

Wage Adjustment in the Great Recession and Other Downturns: Evidence from the United States and Great Britain (2016, methodology): “13 Concurrently with our research, Blundell et al. (2014) and Gregg et al. (2014) also have used the NES to study British wage adjustment in the Great Recession.”