This thesis uses Australian unit-record data to examine two important aspects of labour supply behaviour. The first part of this thesis examines the participation decisions of Australian teenagers. Traditionally, the decision of whether to complete school or enter the labour force has been explained using personal characteristics, such as age and gender, and family background characteristics, such as parents' education. Chapter 2 extends this framework to consider whether neighbourhood characteristics provide information about these participation decisions over and above personal and family background characteristics. The results suggest that neighbourhood effects are present. Also within this framework, Chapter 3 considers whether government policy initiatives, designed to increase the proportion of Australian teenagers completing high school, achieved this aim. Again, the results suggest that this extension increases our understanding of teenage participation decisions. The second part of this thesis investigates two aspects of job-search behaviour. Chapter 4 examines the factors that affect how teenagers look for work. An equilibrium search model is developed to explain why local labour market conditions may be important. The empirical analysis supports the model's implication that teenagers in high unemployment areas are more likely to use general search methods, such as a newspapers or employment agencies, which appear to be less successful on average. Chapter 5 considers whether reservation wage information helps to explain the unemployment duration of the individuals in a sample that covers a wider cross-section of the Australian labour market. Despite the importance of this variable in job-search models, it does not appear to explain unemployment duration experiences once background characteristics and previous labour market experience has been controlled for.

The East German industrial relations system was completely replaced by the transfer of the West German dual system of industrial relations after political Unification in 1990. Works councils emerged, the former socialist trade unions were taken over by their western counterparts, and West German labour law and regulations were implemented. The thesis focuses on the transformation of workplace relations, with special reference to the viewpoint of the workforce. It is argued that this approach, which has been so far neglected in the German literature, is necessary for a full understanding of the transformation processes. The study examines firstly workers' (both union and non-union members) perceptions of organisational changes and management, of their workfellows and their new collective representative machinery (works councils, union). Secondly, it analyses workers' reactions towards the establishment and functioning of the new interest institutions. This is done more specifically with regard to workers' inclination to participate in collective activities. By testing a selection of social psychological theories associated with the willingness to participate (theories of rational choice, of social identity, of frustration- aggression and of micro-mobilization), the core end product should be an understanding of who engages in collective activities in this specific cultural context and why. Furthermore, both dimensions, perceptions and reactions, are used to test the hypotheses of the literature that East German workers are strongly individualistic, instrumental and passive with regard to participation in collective activities; and that the newly established works councils and unions have not been successfully "institutionalised" from the viewpoint of the workforce. The empirical study is based on a case study of a privatised textile company (including qualitative and quantitative methods) and on a questionnaire survey of a sample of members of the textile union in East Germany in more than 50 companies. The main findings are that most workers seemed highly dissatisfied with the changes at their workplaces, had strong them-us feelings toward the management, believed in the value of unions and collectivism, and expressed a considerable willingness to participate in collective activities. The new interest institutions were accepted as being necessary, even though their current work was more critically evaluated. This supports the argument that works councils and union have been successfully "institutionalised" from the workers' perspective. The major result however is that workers were not characterized by a strong individualism in contrast to the widespread hypothesis of the literature. Yet, they were difficult to be classified as pure collectivists or pure individualists because many displayed mixed responses regarding different issues. They were equally difficult to classify as purely instrumental, identity- oriented or otherwise regarding collective activities. Thus, the perceived instrumentality of collective action and institutions, union identity, the perception of collective interests and the attribution of workplace problems all contributed to the prediction of individual participation in collective activities. No single examined theory provided a sufficient explanation on its own and they seemed to offer complementary rather than alternative explanations.

This thesis studies important evolutions in three areas in labour economics: the flow approach, the efficiency wage hypothesis and unions. In part one I discuss gross job flows in the U.K., while part II is concerned with wage determination and firm performance. I give an introduction in chapter I where I motivate the study of gross job flows and I highlight the importance of spillovers from the product market to the labour market and vice versa. In chapter II I analyze a pattern of gross job creation and destruction in the U.K. during the 70's and early 80's. At any point in time and even within narrowly defined sectors simultaneous creation and destruction of jobs is observed, the latter being more variable over the cycle. Gross job reallocation, defined as the sum of gross job creation and destruction, is counter cyclical. Chapter III explores the relationship between firm size and job creation and destruction. The largest firms create and destroy most jobs. However, in percentage terms the gross job creation rate is largest in small firms, while the gross job destruction rate is lowest. I further investigate the size distribution dynamics and find that in the long run firms converge towards their average size, while plants do not. The final chapter of part I compares gross job flows across countries and shows the difficulties involved in making a consistent comparison. In part II I analyze vertical spillovers from the labour market to the product market and vice versa. I show that there exists a positive relationship between the wage paid in the firm and its market share performance, only under the hypothesis of efficiency wages. The theory is supported by evidence from firm level panel data. I show that important new insights may be obtained if the product market is explicitly taken into account when analyzing labour problems. Finally, in chapter VI I investigate the impact of unions on employment growth in the U.K. and find that unions have a negative effect on employment growth, but a positive effect on employment levels, although this effect is not robust with respect to time. Moreover, the union effect is weaker the more competitors the firm faces.

This thesis analyses the effects of current and proposed pension policies for the UK, and critically assesses the arguments for different forms of intervention. It aims to contribute to the pension reform debate in four main ways. First, it presents an original typology of four 'ideal type' pension systems - targeting, basic income, social insurance and compulsory saving - which allows the plethora of different reform proposals to be grouped into manageable bundles, and brings out the key choices facing pension reformers. Second, it aims to make the debate better informed by providing estimates of future pensioner incomes and fiscal sustainability using the relatively new techniques of dynamic microsimulation and generational accounting. In particular, an extended version of the dynamic model PENSIM is used to project pensioner incomes in 2066. Third, it provides an assessment of one particular pension reform - the replacement of the State Earnings-Related Pension Scheme by a new State Second Pension - through describing the rationale for and effects of the new scheme. Finally, it adds to broader theoretical debates about the rationale for, and effectiveness of, different forms of retirement income provision, supplementing the economics and social policy literatures on the role (if any) for compulsory earnings-related pensions and the trade-off between incentives and redistribution. The analysis shows that the UK is an exceptional case. In contrast to most developed countries distributional concerns rather than cost dominate. The government's reforms will do relatively little to improve these distributional outcomes. This reflects the fact that, although the government (correctly) reject compulsorily linking benefits to earnings, connections between entitlements and contributions have not been severed entirely. This thesis argues that it is this linkage which undermines current policy, and that future reforms should move away from the idea of pensions as insurance towards a more rights-based approach.

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In the last twenty-five years a substantial proportion of Asian immigrants to the United Kingdom found work in the wool textile industry. Examples from the history of the industry are used to establish a working definition of cheap labour and the results of fieldwork conducted in wool textile firms in Bradford, West Yorkshire, show that Asian workers satisfy this definition. In fact a racial division of labour was established in these companies with Asians working in a labour process which had been transformed by employers responding to a crisis of profitability. The labour of Asian workers - in common with other forms of cheap labour - was used as an adjunct to industrial change. That Asians have provided cheap labour can not be explained in terms of their migrant or peasant origins. Asians did not put up with jobs rejected by others because of their 'culture', their 'capabilities' or even because of what their employers believed their culture and capabilities to be. Instead, they suffered discrimination which resulted from ascription in the form of racism and which led to their exclusion from other jobs. They had no alternative to cheap labour. Wool textile employers also held racist beliefs but the racial division of labour arose when employers could not afford to discriminate. It was the outcome of the accommodation of racism to profit. By the late nineteen seventies, however, there were indications that profitability and discrimination were no longer mutually exclusive aims in some wool textile work to which Asians had gained access. This development might go some way towards explaining why the proportion of Bradford's wool textile workers who were Asian began to fall at the end of the decade.

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