Labour mobility and earnings in the UK, 1992-2016

Abstract

We combine information from the British Household Panel Study (BHPS) and the UK Longitudinal Household Study (UKHLS, a.k.a. Understanding Society) to construct consistent time series of aggregate worker stocks, worker flows and earnings in the UK over the 1992-2016 period for all workers as well as for two separate education groups. We propose a method to harmonise data between the BHPS and UKHLS, which we validate by checking the consistency of some of our headline time series with equivalent series produced from other sources, notably by the ONS. In addition to drawing a detailed aggregate picture of the UK labour market over the past two and a half decades, we hope that our analysis will help demonstrate the usefulness of a combined BHPS/UKHLS data set for the analysis of UK labour markets.