The Wage and Employment Dynamics (WED) project aims to bring together data to provide insights into the dynamics of earnings and employment. The aim is to do this by integrating data across individuals across years, jobs, income sources and employers. This is a large project, with significant potential to improve our understanding of wage and employment issues from labour market entry, through job mobility and career progression to retirement decisions.
A team of researchers from UWE, University of London (CUL), UCL, and the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) will create a wage and employment spine to do just this. We will train users on the spine and generate research findings of direct interest to policy makers.
This will entail analysis of:
- Employment: focusing on the drivers of hourly wages, part- and full-time employment, self-employment, underemployment, and retirement decisions
- Households: focusing on the structure of households and household resources and the way they affect participation in the labour market, including child care, retirement decisions, and the impact of Universal Credit (UC)
- Employer perspectives: focusing on how workers achieve wage growth both within and across firms, and how employers react to changing labour market conditions, such as shifts in skills, demand, technology and minimum wages.
At the heart of the project is
the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE) and New Earnings Survey (NES).
These survey datasets derive from a 1% sample of all employees in employment
and will be developed to provide a truly longitudinal research resource. An
ASHE/NES dataset which has longitudinal integrity across workers and jobs, with
consistent referencing across data sets and time, will constitute a valuable
research asset in its own right.
In addition, we aim to undertake six
major linkage projects, in which we will create robust, documented linkages
between the employee records contained in ASHE and data on:
- enterprises
and establishments – contained in the Interdepartmental Business Register,
(IDBR);
- personal
and household characteristics – contained in the 2011 Census;
- educational
attainment – contained in HESA (Higher Education Student data);
- benefit
history – contained in DWP benefit records;
- pay
records – contained in HMRC PAYE data;
- self-employment
income – contained in HMRC Self Assessment (SA) records.
Through these various linking projects, we aim to create a core data set which allows integrated analysis of all forms of income across working lives, with the capacity to address a wide range of future analytical requirements. The end goal of the project is to turn this fully-linked dataset into a sustainable ‘wage and employment spine’ (WES), so that researchers no longer need to create new linkages each time. The linked data will be used for research purposes within the project itself, but the spine will form an ongoing resource for researchers. The intention is for the WES to form the basis for linked-data projects beyond 2022, both for academics and government agencies.
To find out more visit the WED website or sign up to their newsletter.
