IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/uwe/wpaper/20121210.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Issues in the measurement of low pay: 2010

Author

Listed:
  • Suzanne Fry

    (Office for National Statistics)

  • Felix Ritchie

    (University of the West of England, Bristol)

Abstract

The UK uses two major surveys as sources of earnings information to estimate the numbers on low pay. The methods for producing these figures are well established, but there are differences between employer and employee responses. These differences are accepted as a consequence of the different survey methods and purposes. Ormerod and Ritchie (2007) reviewed these explanations, and argued that all the results reflect, to a greater or lesser degree, behavioural response by both employers and survey respondents. In particular, the absolute and relative level of the minimum wage affected decisions made by employers and by the way that information is gathered. They also noted that the timing of data collection can affect the measurement. This paper updates that work with information up to 2009. The additional three years of data support and expand upon the earlier conclusions of that paper. In addition, some minor changes were made to the surveys to address measurement issue. This work notes that these changes had less effect than expected, implying that some of the measurement issues are more deep-seated than expected. As before, this paper supports the current methods for generating low pay estimates but suggests that "the number of low paid" can be a misleading construct without an awareness of these background issues.

Suggested Citation

  • Suzanne Fry & Felix Ritchie, 2012. "Issues in the measurement of low pay: 2010," Working Papers 20121210, Department of Accounting, Economics and Finance, Bristol Business School, University of the West of England, Bristol.
    • Handle: RePEc:uwe:wpaper:20121210
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www2.uwe.ac.uk/faculties/BBS/BUS/Research/economics2012/1210%20Issues%20in%20the%20Measurement%20of%20Low%20Pay%202010.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Woon Wong & Iris Biefang-Frisancho Mariscal & Wanru Yao & Peter Howells, 2013. "Liquidity and credit risks in the UK’s financial crisis," Working Papers 20131301, Department of Accounting, Economics and Finance, Bristol Business School, University of the West of England, Bristol.
    2. Wessam Abouarghoub & Iris Biefang-Frisancho Mariscal & Peter Howells, 2013. "A two-state Markov-switching distinctive conditional variance application for tanker freight returns," Working Papers 20131314, Department of Accounting, Economics and Finance, Bristol Business School, University of the West of England, Bristol.
    3. Iris Biefang-Frisancho Mariscal, 2013. "Risk-taking and monetary policy before the crisis: The case of Germany," Working Papers 20131308, Department of Accounting, Economics and Finance, Bristol Business School, University of the West of England, Bristol.
    4. Hilary Drew & Anna King & Ritchie Felix, 2014. "How do knowledge brokers work? The case of WERS," Working Papers 20141403, Department of Accounting, Economics and Finance, Bristol Business School, University of the West of England, Bristol.
    5. Wessam M. T. Abouarghoub & Iris Biefang-Frisancho Mariscal, 2011. "Measuring level of risk exposure in tanker Shipping freight markets," International Journal of Business and Social Research, MIR Center for Socio-Economic Research, vol. 1(1), pages 20-44, December.
    6. Peter Howells, 2013. "The US Fed and the Bank of England: Ownership, structure and 'independence'," Working Papers 20131311, Department of Accounting, Economics and Finance, Bristol Business School, University of the West of England, Bristol.
    7. Croucher, Richard & Ramakrishnan, Sumeetra & Rizov, Marian & Benzinger, Diana, 2015. "Perceptions of employability among London’s low-paid: ‘Self-determination’ or ethnicity?," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 39(1), pages 109-130.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:uwe:wpaper:20121210. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Jo Michell (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/seuweuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.