Two sides to every story: measuring the polarisation of work

Paul Gregg and Jonathan Wadsworth

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: Individual and household based aggregate measures of joblessness can, and do, offer conflicting signals about labour market performance if work is unequally distributed. This paper introduces a simple set of indices that can be used to measure the extent of divergence between individual and household-based jobless measures. The indices, built around a comparison of the actual household jobless rate with that which would occur if work were randomly distributed over the working age population, conform to basic consistency axioms and can be decomposed to try to identify the likely source of any disparity between nonemployment rates calculated at the 2 levels of aggregation. Applying these measures to data for Britain, we show that there has been a growing disparity ¿ polarisation - between the individual and household based jobless measures that are largely unrelated to changes in household structure or the principal characteristics associated with individual joblessness.

Keywords: Workless households; Distribution of work; Polarisation; Joblessness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C1 J0 J6 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34 pages
Date: 2004-05
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/19959/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Two Sides to Every Story: Measuring the Polarisation of Work (2004)
Working Paper: Two Sides to Every Story: Measuring the Polarisation of Work (2004)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:19959

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