Close
Chiara Cavaglia, London School of Economics and Political Science and Ben Etheridge, University of Essex
(Project no. 1001626)
The project aims at looking at the impact of wage and job polarization on the living standards of males and females, with a specific focus on families.
It aims to investigate the impact of job polarization on the standards of living and on family formation histories of couples in Britain. Job polarization is determined by the decrease in the demand for medium-skilled occupations. A direct consequence is that wages and employment in routine jobs grew less than those in high and low earning occupations.
The research performed using ONS LS data is complementary to, and it is motivated by, the investigation about the impact of job polarization on the distribution of household incomes. We use the British Household Panel Survey on a sample of couples in their prime age. We estimate changes in earnings and we analyse the occupational patterns. The preliminary results indicate: (1) Earnings of workers in routine tasks held up, at least for older workers. (2) The spousal labour supply does not appear to be particularly affected by the head's job. (3) Little effect of job polarization on the distribution of household income.
We aim to investigate whether job polarisation has affected families in a way that is not captured by the household income. We are particularly interested in family formation.
The different sets of results based on the two dataset will be part of the same research paper.
As the LS is individual based, the base for our LS sample will be the individual.
Cross-sectionally, the information about the partner/spouse variables (education, standard occupational classification, ethnicity, year of birth, age) will be used to check if the characteristics of the sample members are similar or different to the characteristics of their partners (assortative mating).
It is not a problem if this sample is smaller than the sample used for the longitudinal part of the analysis
For the longitudinal part of the analysis, we will use the household characteristics (tenure, type of accommodation, size, number of kids, marital status, health, etc…) to check whether these variables are related to the occupation (in terms of broad categories based on the standard occupation classification). Specifically, if they change when the occupational group changes.