Can we estimate the impact of the choices package in pathways to work?

The Pathways to Work programme is an important policy innovation in Britain. It provides greater support, obligations and incentives for claimants of incapacity benefits with the goal of encouraging employment. The programme has various components, including a 'Choices' package. 'Choices' is the collective name for a variety of voluntary schemes intended to improve labour market readiness and opportunities. Previous quantitative research has focused on the overall impact of Pathways to Work while this study was designed to look at the impact of the Choices component

How much do lifetime earnings explain retirement resources?

We use a unique dataset, containing individual survey data from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing linked to administrative data on earnings histories from administrative records, to construct measures of lifetime earnings and examine how these relate to financial resources in retirement. Retirement income and wealth at retirement is, as expected, positively correlated with lifetime earnings but there is also substantial dispersion in retirement income and retirement wealth among people with similar lifetime earnings. For example, we find that those with greater numerical ability and higher education tend to have greater retirement resources even after controlling for differences in lifetime earnings. The retirement resources of single women are far less well explained by their own lifetime earnings than those of couples or single men. We hypothesise that, as the vast majority of single women in the age group considered had previously been married and are now widowed or divorced, this reflects the fact that we do not observe the lifetime earnings of their former spouses.Lifetime earnings, savings, wealth, retirement

Extensive and Intensive Margins of Labour Supply: Working Hours in the US, UK and France

This paper documents the key stylised facts underlying the evolution of labour supply at the extensive and intensive margins in the last forty years in three countries: United-States, United-Kingdom and France. We develop a statistical decomposition that provides bounds on changes at the extensive and intensive margins. This decomposition is also shown to be coherent with the analysis of labour supply elasticities at these margins. We use detailed representative micro-datasets to examine the relative importance of the extensive and intensive margins in explaining the overall changes in total hours worked.labor supply, employment, hours of work

Speak \u27em fair : Discourse and Dissembling in \u3cem\u3eThe Jew of Malta\u3c/em\u3e

Barabas, the title character of Marlowe\u27s tragedy, is the embodiment of contradiction. Under persecution, he trangresses Christian norms in order to create his own identity, and yet, in the same instant, his antics make him the very monster of medieval legend. Hence the question arises: is Barabas\u27 rebellion skillful enough to deconstruct Maltese (and English) anti-Semitism, or do his actions merely confirm the Jewish stereotype? In working toward an answer, in this paper I provide an introduction to the French philosopher Michel Foucault, using containment theory to create a theoretical framework for addressing the problems of representation in The Jew of Malta

A cost-benefit analysis of pathways to work for new and repeat incapacity benefits claimants

This latest research forms part of a comprehensive independent evaluation of Pathways to Work. The report is based on a cost-benefit analysis conducted by a consortium of researchers from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and the Policy Studies Institute. It examines whether the financial benefits from Pathways are larger or smaller than its costs and the generalisability of some of the quantitative findings. The estimates of costs and benefits relate to new and repeat incapacity benefits claimants in the seven original Jobcentre Plus districts. The overall findings provide a favourable impression of the financial benefits of the Pathways to Work for new and repeat incapacity benefits claimants, for the Exchequer and hence, for society as a whole

Labor force participation by the elderly and employment of the young: The case of France

One of the justifications provided for early retirement policies in developed countries is the idea that such policies can facilitate access to the labor market for younger people and help lower global unemployment. But many questions remain on the true effect on young workers of these policies. The objective of the present paper is to study the long term relationship between labor force participation of the old and unemployment of the young in France since the beginning of the 1970s. Establishing causal relationship of the reduction of labor force participation of the old on employment prospect of the young is a challenging work. Evidence of the correlation between youth labor market outcomes and older worker's labor force participation plead more in favor of a positive association between younger and older workers' employment. An increase in the older workers' participation is indeed correlated with an increase in the employment rate of young workers and a decrease in their unemployment rate. Even controlling for the economic cycle, this positive association remains - albeit less robustly. These correlations, based on times series, are not however evidence of causal relationship between younger and older workers' employment. We then use an index summarizing the intensity of policies aiming at removing older workers from the labor market, based on Social Security wealth. The effect of the wealth index on youth labor market outcomes is always significant, whatever the set of the control variables we use and with a similar size and the same sign. The coefficient is negative for both the unemployment and employment of youth, with or without controlling for school attendance. In France policies aiming at removing older workers from the labor market have been prompted by increase in unemployment. Granger causality tests between youth unemployment and the Wealth index show therefore a significant link in both directions, whereas nothing is significant between youth employment and the Wealth index. Hence if we do not find evidence that reducing labor force participation of the old provide jobs for the young, we cannot exclude altogether that some general and unaccounted cause is hiding its true impact.retirement policies ; labor market participation ; unemployment