Research
PUBLICATIONS
The Age-Wage-Productivity Puzzle: Evidence from the Careers of Top Earners (with Carl Singleton, Adesola Sunmoni and Paul Telemo) Economic Inquiry, 1–23 (2023) (manuscript and poster)
Extreme wages, performance and superstars in a market for footballers (with Carl Singleton and Paul Telemo) Industrial Relations: A Journal of Economy and Society, 60(1), pp. 84-118 (2021)
Do high wage footballers play for high wage teams? (with Carl Singleton and Paul Telemo) International Journal of Sport Finance, 15(4), pp. 177-190 (2020) (manuscript)
WORKING PAPERS
The Incidence of Workplace Pensions: Evidence from the UK’s Automatic Enrollment Mandate (with Daniel Schaefer and Tomasz Sulka). Submitted.
Many countries have recently introduced automatic enrollment programs for workplace pensions, requiring employers to pay contributions. We examine who bears the costs of such mandated pension programs, exploiting the quasi-experimental rollout of automatic enrolment in the UK. We provide two novel findings: First, total compensation (the sum of basic pay, extra pay, and employer pension contribution) increases, driven by employer contributions, while the amount of extra pay decreases. We do not find evidence that the policy affects working hours. Second, these effects differ by employer size, with extra pay declining to such an extent in large employers that total compensation does not increase. Our findings provide the first evidence that large employers shift the cost of automatic enrolment onto employees, adversely impacting take-home pay.
Flexibility or certainty? The aggregate effects of casual jobs on labour markets
There is currently much debate about the extent to which governments should regulate labour markets. One discussion concerns casual contracts, where firms do not need to guarantee workers certain, fixed, hours of work and instead provide work as and when needed. These jobs, sometimes known as "zero-hours", "contingent" or "on-demand", provide flexibility for firms to change the size of their workforce cheaply and quickly and for workers to choose whether to supply labour in every period. This flexibility comes at the expense of certainty for both firms and workers. I then develop a search and matching model incorporating casual jobs, which I use to evaluate the effect of labour market policies on aggregate outcomes. I find that a ban on casual jobs increases unemployment, but that the average wage of those employed actually increases and that the effect on aggregate worker utility is negligible. I also consider the effect of a higher minimum wage for casual jobs. I find that the effects are limited. These results are due to an offsetting mechanism: although higher wages lead to higher unemployment, as firms offer more full-time jobs, the number of workers called-up in any one period increases.
WORK IN PROGRESS
Long term trends in part-time work in the United Kingdom