The UK Wage Curve: New Evidence from the British Household Panel Survey

William Collier

Studies in Economics from School of Economics, University of Kent

Abstract: This paper investigates the UK wage curve using longitudinal micro data drawn from the first eight waves of the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS). We estimate a fixed-effects model that controls for observed and unobserved individual-specific heterogeneity. Our results suggest that there is evidence of a negative relationship in wage-unemployment space. The estimated unemployment elasticity of pay for UK males is approximately ?0.14 and this elasticity is robust to a number of alternative specifications. There is no evidence of a significant wage curve for women. These findings are consistent with panel studies reported for other countries. They contrast with previous studies for the UK, however, in that they reject the inclusion of higher order polynomial terms for unemployment. The main findings of the paper, therefore, are that the wage-unemployment relationship is robust but not as non-linear as has been previously thought.

Keywords: Wage Structure; Wage Curve; Panel data; Unemployment; Regional Labour Markets (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C23 J30 J60 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2000-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.kent.ac.uk/economics/repec/0010.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ukc:ukcedp:0010

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Studies in Economics from School of Economics, University of Kent School of Economics, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7FS.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Dr Anirban Mitra ().