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With one-fifth of the UK labour force employed in the public sector, public sector pay and its interaction with private sector pay is an important driver of the macroeconomy. Using new data on sector-level earnings and sector-industry-level pay settlements, this paper addresses the fundamental question of which sector leads and which follows in terms of earnings determination. We find that in the long run, public sector wages adjust to wages set in the private sector, maintaining a consistent relationship. We further find that there can be significant wage spillovers from the public sector to the private sector in the short run. These tend to be more pronounced for private sector industries that are domestically facing, characterized by low worker bargaining power, or reliant on public sector inputs. This paper's findings have important implications for macroeconomic policy that aims to balance inflationary forces and fiscal funding pressures.

Economists have used Covid-19 as an exogenous shock to improve understanding of sports markets and in doing so gain broader economic insights.These natural experiments have provided partial answers to: how airborne viruses may spread in crowds; how people respond to the risk and information about infection; how the absence of crowds reduces the social pressure that can affect arbitration decisions; and how quickly asset (betting) prices reflect new information.We review this evidence and reflect on how (sports) economics research can continue to be most valuable to policymakers.

Access to fast food has often been blamed for the rise in obesity which in turn has motivated policies to curb the spread of fast food. However, robust evidence in this area is scarce, particularly using data outside of the US. It is difficult to estimate a causal effect of fast food given spatial sorting and ever-present exposure. We investigate whether the residential access to fast food increased BMI of adolescents at a time when fast food restaurants started to open in the UK. The time period presents the study with large spatial and temporal differences in exposure as well as plausibly exogenous variation. We merge data on the location and timing of the first openings of all fast food outlets in the UK from 1968-1986, with data on objectively measured BMI from the 1970 British Cohort Survey. The relationship between adolescent BMI and the distance from the respondents' homes and time since opening, is studied using OLS and Instrumental Variables regression. We find that fast food exposure had no effect on BMI. Extensive robustness checks do not change our conclusion.

The Covid-19 pandemic has induced worldwide natural experiments on the effects of crowds. We exploit one of these experiments that took place over several countries in almost identical settings: professional football matches played behind closed doors within the 2019/20 league seasons. We find large and statistically significant effects on the number of yellow cards issued by referees. Without a crowd, fewer cards were awarded to the away teams, reducing home advantage. These results have implications for the influence of social pressure and crowds on the neutrality of decisions.

The economics of sport and how sport provides insights into economics have experienced exogenous shocks from Covid-19, facilitating many natural experiments. These have provided partial answers to questions of: how airborne viruses may spread in crowds; how crowds respond to the risk and information about infection; how the absence of crowds may affect social pressure and arbitration decisions; and how quickly betting markets respond to new information. We review this evidence and advise how sports economics research could continue to be most valuable to policymakers.

In 2020–2021, the world has been gripped by a pandemic that no living person has ever known. The coronavirus pandemic is undoubtedly the greatest challenge the world has faced in over a generation. The imperative of statistical modelling is not only to manage the short-run crisis for the health services, but also to explain the pandemic’s course and establish the effectiveness of different policies, both non-pharmaceutical and with vaccines. This difficult task has been undertaken by the epidemiologists and others in the face of measurement data problems, behavioural complications and endogeneity issues. This paper proposes a simple taxonomy of the alternative different models and suggests how they may be used together to overcome limitations. This perspective may have important implications for how policy-makers cope with future waves or strains in the current pandemic, or future pandemics.

This article takes a short personal 'helicopter ride' over the main policy issues in the UK labour market, putting them into the context of the developments which have taken place in applied econometrics. We overview NIESR's role in the study of labour economics in postwar Britain and review some recent advances of importance in the current Institute research agenda.

The paper examines how incentives to participate in on-line assessments (quizzes) affect students’ effort and performance. Our identification strategy exploits within-student weekly variation in incentives to attempt on-line quizzes. We find that tournament incentives and participation incentives are ineffective in increasing quiz participation. In contrast, making the quiz count towards the final grade substantially increases participation. We find no evidence of displacement of effort between weeks. Using a natural experiment which provides variation in assessment weighting of the quizzes between two cohorts, we find that affected students obtain better examination grades. We estimate the return to 10% assessment weighting to be around 0.27 of a standard deviation in the in-term examination grade. We find no evidence that assessment weighting has unintended consequences, i.e. that increased quiz effort displaces effort over the year, reduces other forms of effort or reduces (effort and thus) performance in other courses. Finally, assessment weighting induced effort increases most for students at and below median ability, resulting in a reduction of the grade gap by 17%.

We revisit the question of what is the rate of return to education in Great Britain. We make two contributions. Firstly, we re-assess the robustness of Harmon and Walker (1995), Oreopoulos (2006) and Devereux and Hart (2010) to equation specification and estimation method. Secondly, we generalize the previous IV approaches by using the month of birth in the calculation of a more accurate IV exploiting the 1947, 1963 and 1972 UK School Leaving Age reforms. Our results highlight the importance of equation specification and they provide a robust case for a 6% Rate of Return to Education for men. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Declining working hours, their variation, and their distribution over different occupations and sectors is a topic of great importance.There is constant pressure to reduce working hours on grounds of work-life balance considerations.Debate is ongoing as to whether and how this can be achieved through technological change, without causing a regressive redistribution of income away from less skilled workers.Looking ahead, achieving the optimal balance between these factors will be a major challenge for policymakers.Annual hours worked by country, 1995-2015 ELEVATOR PITCHWorking hours across the world are falling, but considerable variation remains.In some countries people work 70% more hours per year, on average, than in other countries.Much of this variation is due to differences in the prevalence of part-time work and patterns of female labor market participation.Looking ahead, the question of how reducing working hours will affect productivity is significant.In addition, how individuals divide up their leisure and work time and what the appropriate worklife balance is in an increasingly technological future are important concerns.

SummaryThe paper examines how incentives to participate in on-line assessments (quizzes) affect students’ effort and performance. Our identification strategy exploits within-student weekly variation in incentives to attempt on-line quizzes. We find that tournament incentives and participation incentives are ineffective in increasing quiz participation. In contrast, making the quiz count towards the final grade substantially increases participation. We find no evidence of displacement of effort between weeks. Using a natural experiment which provides variation in assessment weighting of the quizzes between two cohorts, we find that affected students obtain better examination grades. We estimate the return to 10% assessment weighting to be around 0.27 of a standard deviation in the in-term examination grade. We find no evidence that assessment weighting has unintended consequences, i.e. that increased quiz effort displaces effort over the year, reduces other forms of effort or reduces (effort and thus) performance in other courses. Finally, assessment weighting induced effort increases most for students at and below median ability, resulting in a reduction of the grade gap by 17%.

This paper reviews the current state of empirical econometric identification in the economics of networks. Possible identification strategies which exploit the properties and characteristics of networks are described. The main arguments are illustrated with examples from the US AddHealth data and an account of the Bloomsbury Group network. Prescriptive suggestions, based on the way in which networks actually form and operate, are made for a more considered approach to empirical econometric work which involves networks.

Restricted access to primary care can lead to avoidable, excessive use of expensive emergency care. Since 2013, partly to alleviate overcrowding at the Accident & Emergency (A&E) units of hospitals, the UK has been piloting 7-day opening of General Practitioner (GP) practices to improve primary care access for patients. We evaluate the impact of these pilots on patient attendances at A&E. We estimate that 7-day GP opening has reduced A&E attendances by patients of pilot practices by 9.9% with most of the impact on weekends which see A&E attendances fall by 17.9%. The effect is non-monotonic in case severity with most of the fall occurring in cases of moderate severity. An additional finding is that there is also a 9.9% fall in weekend hospital admissions (from A&E) which is entirely driven by a fall in admissions of elderly patients. The impact on A&E attendances appears to be bigger among wealthier patients. We present evidence in support of a causal interpretation of our results and discuss policy implications.

There is a worldwide epidemic of obesity. We are just beginning to understand its consequences for child obesity. This paper addresses one important component of the crisis – namely the extent to which obesity – or more generally – adiposity - is passed down from one generation to the next. Using the Body Mass Index (BMI) as a measure of adiposity, we estimate the elasticity of intergenerational transmission using ordinary least squares, quantile analysis and fixed effects analysis. We use data from around the world: British 1970 Cohort Studies (BCS1970), Health Survey for England (HSE 1995-2010), National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey in the US (NHNAES 1988-1994), the Spanish National Health Survey (ENS-2006), the Survey for the Evaluation of Urban Households (ENCELURB 2002, 2004 and 2009) data in Mexico, China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS 1989-2009) and Indonesian Family Life Survey (IFLS 1993, 2000 and 2007) We find that the elasticity of intergenerational transmission is very similar across countries and relatively constant – at 0.2 per parent. Our substantive finding is that this elasticity is very comparable across time and countries - even if these countries are at very different stages of economic development. Quantile analysis suggests that this intergenerational transmission mechanism is substantively different across the distribution of children’s BMI - more than double for the fattest children what it is for the thinnest children. Our evidence from different countries’ data suggests that there is a strong consistency in the IBE estimates across countries, the research puts the emphasis firmly on the family in terms of understanding the considerable fraction of adiposity determination, it also has major implications for public health measures addressed at tackling the growing childhood obesity.