Andrea Salvatori

Economic downturn and stress testing European welfare systems

As unemployment rises across the European Union (EU), it is important to understand the extent to which the incomes of the new unemployed are protected by tax–benefit systems and to assess the cost pressures on the social protection systems of this increase in unemployment. This chapter uses the EU tax–benefit model EUROMOD to explore these issues, comparing effects in five EU countries. It provides evidence on the differing degrees of resilience of the household incomes of the newly unemployed due to the variations in the protection offered by the tax–benefit systems, according to whether unemployment benefit is payable, the household situation of the unemployed person and across countries.

The Anatomy of Job Polarisation in the UK

This paper studies the contribution of different skill groups to the polarisation of the UK labour market. We show that the large increase in graduate numbers contributed to the substantial reallocation of employment from middling to top occupations which is the main feature of the polarisation process in the UK over the past three decades. The increase in the number of immigrants, on the other hand, does not account for any particular aspect of the polarisation in the UK. Changes in the skill mix of the workforce account for most of the decline in routine employment across the occupational distribution, but within-group changes account for most of the decline in routine occupations in middling occupations. In addition, there is no clear indication of polarisation within all skill groups—a fact that previous literature has cited as evidence that technology drives the decline of middling occupations. These findings differ substantially from previous evidence on the US and cast doubts on the role of technology as the main driver of polarisation in the UK.

The Effects of the EU Equal‐Treatment Directive for Fixed‐Term Workers: Evidence from the UK

In 2002, the UK implemented the EU Directive mandating equal treatment of fixed-term and permanent workers. This article uses 11 years of data from the Labour Force Survey to assess whether the new legislation has led to a decrease in the average wage gap between fixed-term and permanent workers. For women, there is no evidence of that. For men, the wage gap appears to have closed after 2002. However, this gap was falling even before 2002, and some evidence of changes in the selection of workers after the implementation of the Directive casts doubts on the extent to which the closing of the gap can be ascribed to the new legislation.

Stress testing the UK welfare system for unemployment

This article examines the resilience (or otherwise) of the United Kingdom social protection system in the face of increasing unemployment. It explores the extent to which benefits protect the household incomes of unemployed people both in relative terms and in comparison with an absolute income threshold. It finds that for the people most likely to become unemployed in the first phase of the current downturn most of any protection they have comes from the earnings of other household, members. In the case of sole-earner households, the benefit system fails to maintain household income above the poverty threshold in most cases and the relative drop in income for this group is very high by international standards.

The effect of computer use on job quality

This paper studies changes in computer use and job quality in the EU-15 between 1995 and 2015. We document that while the proportion of workers using computers has increased from 40% to more than 60% over twenty years, there remain significant differences between countries even within the same occupations. Several countries have seen a significant increase in computer use even in low-skilled occupations generally assumed to be less affected by technology. Overall, the great increase in computer use between 1995 and 2015 has coincided with a period of modest deterioration of job quality in the EU-15 as whole, as discretion declined for most occupational and educational groups while intensity increased slightly for most of them. Our OLS results that exploit variation within country-occupation cells point to a sizeable positive effect of computer use on discretion, but to small or no effect on intensity at work. Our instrumental variable estimates point to an even more benign effect of computer use on job quality. Hence, the results suggest that the (moderate) deterioration in the quality of work observed in the EU-15 between 1995 and 2015 has occurred despite the spread of computers, rather than because of them.