Essays in public and labour economics

This thesis contains five papers in public and labour economics, exploring how individuals and families respond to, and are affected by, public policies that form key parts of the pension and tax and benefit systems. The first paper examines how women change their retirement behaviour in response to an increase in the age at which they can first draw a state pension (the “state pension age”). Exploiting the policy-driven increase in employment that is studied in the first paper, the second paper examines the effect of women being in paid work in their early 60s on two measures of health: cognitive function and physical disability. The third paper examines how individuals saving for retirement can be affected by their employers automatically enrolling them in employer-provided pensions, as employers are now obliged to do in the UK. The fourth paper seeks to understand better how automatic enrolment drives higher pension saving by examining its effects on the employees of small employers. Finally, the final paper in this thesis examines how individuals are insured against the reduction in employment and earnings that results from entering the labour market during a recession

Civic republican social justice and the case of state grammar schools in England

The aim of this paper is to consider the ways in which civic republican theory can provide a meaningful and useful account of social justice, one that is which holds resonance for educational debates. Recognising the need for educationalists interested in civic republicanism to pay greater attention to ideas of justice – and in particular social justice as it concerns relationships between citizens (citizen to citizen, group to group or citizen to group) – it is argued that a form of civic republicanism committed to freedom as non-domination is capable of providing a substantive model for analysing social (in)justice within educational arenas. After positioning the contribution offered here within existing educational literature on civic republicanism, salient elements of social justice as freedom as non-domination are identified. On this basis, debates concerning the existence and potential expansion of state (public) grammar schools in England are considered in relation to the account of republican social justice as non-domination. It is argued that from this republican position grammar schools (1) represent an arbitrary domination of the interests of those less well off by those with greater material and cultural capital and (2) in doing so lead to advantages for some at the expense of others. Though the focus of the paper is on grammar schools in England, it is suggested that republican justice may be a useful frame for considering similar educational cases in England and elsewhere