The Effect of Wages on Job Vacancy Duration: Evidence from a Spatial Discontinuity (with Judith Delaney and Kerry Papps) - Revise and Resubmit (Journal of Labor Economics)
We exploit a spatial discontinuity in the wages paid by the United Kingdom’s National Health Service to examine how wages affect the duration of time a vacancy is advertised. NHS workers in inner London are mandated by law to be paid an extra 4.3% more than those who work in outer London. We use a regression discontinuity design and estimate an elasticity of duration with respect to wages of -6.3. This number is much larger than estimates reported using observational studies and suggests that firms can fill worker shortages faster by raising wages. This also highlights the importance of looking at this margin of firm recruitment for those studies analysing firm search and job match. Our results are robust to various checks including a placebo check by using fictitious borders and are robust to changes in the chosen bandwidth and the duration measure. The estimates are similar across all job categories in the NHS and not just defined to the more specific jobs such as nurses and therapists; we find similar estimates for those who work in administration and management. Our results provide evidence for policy makers which suggests that increasing the wages paid to NHS workers may lead to increased cost savings by reducing the need to hire expensive agency staff and may also lead to better health outcomes of the population through reduced staff shortages.
Public - Private Wage Spillovers: Evidence from 2022 Public Pay Awards
This paper estimates the effect of public-sector pay awards on private-sector wages, exploiting the unexpectedly large 2022 UK public pay awards as a source of quasi-experimental variation. Interacting pre-determined public employment shares across four bargaining units with nationally set award sizes, I construct occupation–region exposure measures and estimate a difference-in-differences elasticity of 0.17. The 2022 awards, averaging 4.7 per cent across approximately 22 per cent of the workforce, raised private-sector wages by 0.82 percentage points. Four patterns of heterogeneity sharpen the interpretation. The effect is present among workers who remain with the same employer, indicating adjustment operates through within-firm wage-setting rather than cross-sector reallocation. Spillovers follow a U- shaped pattern across the skill distribution, present at both the high- and low-skill ends but absent among medium-skill workers, whose occupations have the lowest overlap with the public sector. Effects are larger for women, consistent with greater female concentration in public-sector-adjacent roles. NHS and Local Government exposure drives the aggregate result. Workers in these subsectors have direct private-sector counterparts, making public offers credible competitive threats. A calibrated search model shows the outside-option channel is insufficient, generating less than half the empirical elasticity, and points to within-match renegotiation as the operative mechanism. The findings provide the first causal evidence of public-wage spillovers in the UK, with direct implications for monetary and fiscal policy.
Adult Education and Job-Match Uncertainty: A Structural Model
This paper studies how job-match uncertainty shapes adult education decisions over the life cycle. I develop and estimate a dynamic model in which individuals choose between employment, unemployment, and formal adult education while facing wage risk and search frictions. The model is estimated on UKHLS data using simulated method of moments to match wage distributions and labour-market transitions. Counterfactual simulations show that lowering tuition costs raises adult education participation by around 3 percentage points, while reducing labour-market frictions that generate uncertainty over post-education job matches increases participation by around 2 percentage points. The results imply that policy can increase adult education not only by reducing direct costs, but also by improving the reliability of post-education employment opportunities.
Risk Aversion, Monopsony and Minimum Wages
I develop a theory in which the distribution of worker risk aversion is a direct source of employer monopsony power, even when individual risk preferences are unobservable to firms. Risk-averse workers dislike the income uncertainty inherent in job transitions and therefore require a larger wage premium before switching employers. This reduces the wage-elasticity of their labour supply to the hiring firm. When risk aversion is heterogeneous across workers and unobservable to firms, the cross-sectional distribution of preferences shapes the aggregate labour supply elasticity that each firm faces and, through this channel, the degree of market power that firms collectively exercise. I formalise this mechanism in a continuous-time wage-posting model with a distribution of CRRA risk-aversion coefficients and an explicit transition friction. Three results follow. First, the minimum wage premium required to induce a voluntary job-to-job move is strictly increasing in the worker's coefficient of relative risk aversion. Second, the aggregate quit rate facing each firm is strictly decreasing---and steady-state labour supply is strictly increasing---in the risk-aversion distribution, in the sense of first-order stochastic dominance. Third, in the wage-posting equilibrium, firms set wages below workers' marginal product; the aggregate monopsony rent is strictly increasing in the risk-aversion distribution. A minimum wage analysis shows that the policy raises wages at the bottom and reduces aggregate monopsony rents without affecting unemployment, and that the welfare gain from the policy is larger when the workforce is more risk-averse, since risk aversion generates a greater pre-existing rent for the minimum wage to correct.
Productivity, Wages and the UK Minimum Wage: Evidence from an Equilibrium Search Model (with Chris Martin)
Bank of England Monetary Policy Report February 2026 - Box B (with Maria Balgova and Doug Rendle)
One possible explanation for the recent strength in wage growth is a structural change in wage-setting behaviour. A machine-learning approach, which identifies heterogeneity in wage-setting across firms and over time, finds little evidence for this hypothesis. Some of the recent unusual strength in wage growth can instead be explained by the lagged response to labour market conditions of firms whose wagesetting resembles collective bargaining behaviour. This type of wage-setting behaviour appears to be much more prevalent than implied by official data on the share of workers covered by collective wage agreements. Given the recent fall in inflation and continued loosening in the labour market, wage inflation among this type of firm is likely to slow in due course, all else equal allowing for a looser monetary policy stance.
Revisiting productivity and innovation in the West of England (with Chris Dimos and Aida Garcia Lazaro)
The West of England Mayoral Combined Authority (WofE CA) oversees economic development and strategic planning in the West of England region, including Bristol, South Gloucestershire, and Bath & North East Somerset. WofE CA aims to enhance productivity and foster innovation, driving economic growth, improving real wages, and raising living standards. This report offers a thorough analysis of the current productivity and innovation landscape in the region, designed to inform regional economic strategies, and facilitate the implementation of WofE CA's Innovation Plan.
Evidence on working parents’ preferences for parental leave (with Joanna Clifton-Sprigg and Kerry Papps)
We will generate and translate new evidence to inform the ongoing governmental review of parental leave and shape future UK policy. Using secondary data (Understanding Society) and a new online survey experiment, and focusing on policy design, we will analyse working parents’ preferences for government-funded parental leave and childcare that support both parents’ sustained labour market engagement and help reduce gender gaps. This work builds on our ongoing collaboration with the Departments for Business and Trade and Work and Pensions, who are leading the review and have sought evidence-based insights on effective policy solutions currently missing from the evidence base.
My work has been mentioned in the following articles: