• gender wage gap
• immigration
• job polarisation
• tasks

In this work, we aim at investigating recent trends and developments in the British labour market. This dissertation is composed of three research papers that present and discuss different aspects of labour market inequalities in the United Kingdom. The first and the second chapters are solo papers, while the third one is co-authored with Prof. Paul Gregg and Prof. Paul Clarke.

In the first chapter, we analyze recent changes in the labour market structure at the occupational level in Britain. Using data from the UK Skills Surveys between 1997 and 2006, we present evidence of job polarisation, that is a shift from a monotonic to a U-shaped relationship between growth in employment share and occupation's percentile in the wage distribution. We interpret the evolution of occupational employment from a task-based perspective exploring Autor, Levy and Murnane (2003) model's predictions. We find that high-paying occupations which increased the most can be safely classified as non-manual non-routine, while middling-paying occupations which have lost significant employment shares are predominantly routine (both manual and non-manual). The task content of low-paying occupations is more mixed, with elementary occupations being predominantly manual and service occupations scoring higher in the interpersonal dimension, and the routine dimension appears more difficult to evaluate. We also explore the relationship between computarisation and routine task inputs and our findings are consistent with the Autor, Levy and Murnane (2003) "routinisation hypothesis".

The second chapter investigates recent changes in the occupational distribution of immigrants in the United Kingdom and it deals with the effects of immigration on local labour markets. We empirically test the predictions of Peri and Sparber (2009) model of comparative advantage in tasks performance to evaluate whether less-skilled natives responded to increasing immigration inflows of similarly educated workers by shifting their provision of task supplies. Using Labour Force Survey (LFS) and UK Skills Survey data from 1997 through 2006, we find that an increase in the foreign-born share has a signicant positive effect on natives' relative communication task supply. In order to cope with potential endogeneity of the share of immigrants, we construct a suitable instrumental variable based on past immigration concentrations. We also show that this effect vary across demographic groups, being higher among men, young people and workers with primary education (or less) relatively to women, old people and workers with secondary education respectively.

Finally, the third chapter investigates how the recent shift towards greater gender equality in labour market participation and wages plays out within households. We explore the implications of these huge changes for the evolution of the spousal wage gap and its relationship with the overall pay gap, changes in labour force participation and the level of assortative mating between partners. We present a statistical model which shows how the probability of a positive spousal wage gap depends on the average gender wage gap, the variance of the male and female wage distributions and on the level of sorting or assortative mating, based on wages, that there is among couples. Using the BHPS survey, we show how the model fits the data well and use it to explore what lies behind the observed decline in men earning more than their partners in terms of hourly wages. We then turn to changing participation patterns of men and women and how this affects our story. After correcting for sample selection, we show that women who are excluded from labour market participation are increasingly those with the lowest potential wage.