Essays on the demand and supply of labour

This thesis contains three chapters analysing labour supply and labour demand, and their interaction. The first two chapters examine the labour market consequences of the rapid expansion of Higher Education in the UK since the 90s. The first chapter looks at the wages of graduates and non-graduates. It proposes a model of endogenous adoption of skill-biased technology to explain the remarkably flat trend of the college wage premium. The second chapter extends the theory by adding the occupational dimension and uses it to study quantitatively the historical phenomenon of job polarisation. It shows a large shift in employment from middle-skill occupations to the higher-skilled ones in the UK. It develops a multi-sector equilibrium model of occupational labour, featuring endogenous adoption of task-biased technology. This can explain not only the employment patterns, but also movements in occupational wage, and occupational trends within education groups. The third chapter investigates the low employment rate of older women in urban China. Based on a wide range of descriptive correlations, I argue that there are two main reasons for the low employment rate. One is the early age at which urban women become eligible for pensions. One is financial transfers from their children. I build and calibrate a life-cycle model of female labour supply, incorporating income uncertainties and income-contingent transfers from children. The model can generate realistic patterns of employment, including a lot of bunching in the timing of labour market exit at the point of pension receipt. I use the model to simulate the effects of increasing pension age

Payback time? : student debt and loan repayments : what will the 2012 reforms mean for graduates?

This report updates and extends the previous IFS work to examine the consequences of these changes for graduates. In particular, we use a new model of graduate earnings and repayments and explore in more detail the pattern and size of loan repayments made, including by different types of graduates

Uniform convergence of optimal order under a balanced norm of a local discontinuous Galerkin method on a Shishkin mesh

For singularly perturbed reaction-diffusion problems in 1D and 2D, we study a local discontinuous Galerkin (LDG) method on a Shishkin mesh. In these cases, the standard energy norm is too weak to capture adequately the behavior of the boundary layers that appear in the solutions. To deal with this deficiency, we introduce a balanced norm stronger than the energy norm. In order to achieve optimal convergence under the balanced norm in one-dimensional case, we design novel numerical fluxes and propose a special interpolation that consists of a Gauss-Radau projection and a local $L^2$ projection. Moreover, we generalize the numerical fluxes and interpolation, and extend convergence analysis of optimal order from 1D to 2D. Finally, numerical experiments are presented to confirm the theoretical results.Comment: 22pages, two table

Payback time? Student debt and loan repayments: what will the 2012 reforms mean for graduates?

This report updates and extends the previous IFS work to examine the consequences of these changes for graduates. In particular, we use a new model of graduate earnings and repayments and explore in more detail the pattern and size of loan repayments made, including by different types of graduates

The Outlook for Higher Education Spending by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills

The current decade is one of significant fiscal austerity for government spending. The coalition government that came to power in 2010 has embarked on a path of fiscal consolidation that is now expected to last at least seven years (up to 2017-18), with tax increases and spending cuts that are together forecast to bring government borrowing back down to sustainable levels. It is not yet clear how some of these cuts to public spending are to be allocated, however, either between departments (beyond 2015-16) or within departments (beyond 2014-15). In this report, funded by Universities UK, we attempt to assess the outlook for government non-investment spending on higher education through to 2017-18. To do this, we first project how total government non-investment spending will evolve through to 2017-18 in the absence of further policy change and then illustrate how this might be allocated between departments, focusing on what the outlook for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) might be. We then investigate the feasibility of different scenarios for spending on higher education by illustrating the implications that such spending would have for other areas of BIS spending