Michael Anyadike-Danes

My Brilliant Career: Characterizing the Early Labor Market Trajectories of British Women From Generation X:

This article uses longitudinal data from the British Cohort Study to examine the early labor market trajectories—the careers—of more than 5,000 women aged 16 to 29 years. Conventional event history approaches focus on particular transitions, the return to work after childbirth, for example, whereas the authors treat female careers more holistically, using sequence methods and cluster analysis to arrive at a rich but readily interpretable description of the data. The authors’ typology presents a fuller picture of the underlying heterogeneity of female career paths that may not be revealed by more conventional transition-focused methods. Furthermore, the authors contribute to the small but growing literature on sequence analysis of female labor force participation by using their typology to show how careers are related to family background and school experiences.

Firm dynamics and job creation in the United Kingdom:1998–2013

This article is motivated by a very simple question – ‘what types of firms create the most jobs in the UK economy?’ One popular answer to this question has been High-Growth Firms (HGFs). These firms represent only a small minority – the ‘Vital 6%’ – of the UK business population yet, but have a disproportionate impact on job creation and innovation. We re-visit the discussion launched by the 2009 National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) reports, which identified the 6% figure and, using more recent data, confirm the headline conclusion for job creation: a small number of job-creating firms (mostly small firms) are responsible for a significant amount of net job creation in the United Kingdom. Adopting our alternative preferred analytical approach, which involves tracking the growth performance of cohorts of start-ups confirms this conclusion; however, we find an even smaller number of job-creating firms are responsible for a very significant proportion of job creation. We conclude by considering the question – ‘what are the implications for policy choices?’

High growth firms, jobs and peripheral regions: the case of Scotland

Enterprise policy is increasingly favouring support for high growth firms (HGFs). However, this may be less effective in promoting new jobs and economic development in peripheral regions. This issue is addressed by a study of HGFs in Scotland. Scottish HGFs differ in a number of respects from the stylised facts in the literature. They create less employment than their counterparts elsewhere in the UK. Most have a significant physical presence outside of Scotland, thereby reducing their Scottish ‘footprint’ and domestic job creation. Scottish HGFs appear to have a high propensity to be acquired, increasing the susceptibility of the head office to closure. The evidence suggests that the tendency towards ‘policy universalism’ in the sphere of entrepreneurship policy is problematic.

Panel estimates of the determinants of British regional male incapacity benefits rolls 1998-2006

This article explores the determinants of the proportion of the working age male population claiming Incapacity Benefits (IB), across the 11 British Government Office Regions, for the period 1998 to 2006. Three different approaches are adopted to modelling register dynamics: first, treating IB stocks as if they were trend-stationary, albeit with persistence, and estimating reduced form models for their logs; second, treating IB stocks as if they were nonstationary and examining their long-run determinants plus short-run equilibrium reversion properties; third, focusing on the determinants of gross inflows and outflows that together drive IB stocks. Given the nature of the data, no approach is ideal yet the models provide reasonably robust evidence that labour market changes–specifically falling unemployment rates and rising real earnings–have contributed to falling male IB stocks over the period.

All grown up? The fate after 15 years of a quarter of a million UK firms born in 1998

The theory of firm growth is in a rather unsatisfactory state. However, the analysis of large firm-level datasets which have become available in recent years allows us to begin building an evidence base which can, in turn, be used to underpin the development of more satisfactory theory. Here we study the 239 thousand UK private sector firms born in 1998 over their first 15 years of life. A first, and quite striking, finding is the extraordinary force of mortality. By age 15, 90% of the UK firms born in 1998 are dead, and, for those surviving to age 15, the hazard of death is still about 10% a year. The chance of death is related to the size and growth of firms in an interesting way. Whilst the hazard rate after 15 years is largely independent of size at birth, it is strongly affected by the current (age 14) size. In particular, firms with more than five employees are half as likely to die in the next year as firms with less than five employees. A second important finding is that most firms, even those which survive to age 15, do not grow very much. By age 15 more than half the 26,000 survivors still have less than five jobs. In other words, the growth paths – what we call the ‘growth trajectories’ – of most of the 26,000 survivors are pretty flat. However, of the firms that do grow, firms born smaller grow faster than those born larger. Another striking finding is that growth is heavily concentrated in the first five years. Whilst growth does continue, even up to age 15, each year after age five it involves only a relatively small proportion of firms. Finally, there are two groups of survivors which contribute importantly to job creation. Some are those born relatively large (with more than 20 jobs) although their growth rate is quite modest. More striking though, is a very small group of firms born very small with less than five jobs (about 5% of all survivors) which contribute a substantial proportion (more than one third) of the jobs added to the cohort total by age 15.

How well are women doing? Female non-employment across UK regions

Discussions of the UKs recent labour market performance commonly mention the contrasting trends in the unemployment rate (down), the employment rate (up) and the inactivity rate (flat). These same commentaries also notice that the ‘flatness’ of the overall inactivity rate masks contrasting trends by sex, with male rates (slowly rising) and female rates (slowly falling) and then proceed to discuss male inactivity in some detail before concluding. Bypassing the composition of female inactivity, these commentaries fail to notice that the male and the female proportions of the population not working by reason of sickness or disability are quite similar. Equally they have rarely noticed that male and female non-employment rates display a very similar regional hierarchy with female rates in the ‘North’ as much as 50% higher than those in the ‘South’, and that there is an even steeper North–South gradient in some of the components of non-employment. For example, sickness and disability rates for females in the North are up to 10% of the working age population, while in the South rates are typically less than half that size.