Alex Bryson
Biographic Data
| ID | 120932 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alex Bryson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alex |
| FAMILY NAME | Bryson |
| SIGNATURE | BRYSON A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University College London |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1529-2010 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 57 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 148 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 55 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1862 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Deteriorating Mental Well‐Being of the Young in the UK
Using several data sets for the UK we track rising perceptions of mental well‐being among the working‐age population in the UK. The trend is apparent among all age groups and for men and women, but it is most pronounced among the young, and especially young women aged under 25. Young men's mental well‐being began to fall markedly from 2008 whereas young women's mental ill‐health began to deteriorate a few years later. The age profile of mental we…
Productivity dynamics among union locals in the United States
Using panel data on union locals in the United States we examine the dynamics of the union sector, investigating the impact of inter‐union competition on locals' productivity and survival. We find low entry rates, high exit rates and high levels of productivity dispersion in the sector. The entry of new locals is not associated with productivity improvements among incumbents but has a small negative association with locals' survival rates. These …
Rising young worker despair in the United States
Between the early 1990s and 2015 the relationship between mental despair and age was hump-shaped in the United States: it rose in middle-age, then declined later in life. That relationship has now changed: mental despair declines with age due to a rise in despair among the young. However, we show for the first time that the relationship between age and mental despair differs by labor market status. The hump-shape in age still exists among non-wor…
The gender wage gap across life
Using two polygenic scores (PGS) for educational attainment in a biomedical study of all those born in a single week in Great Britain in 1958 we show that the genetic predisposition for educational attainment is associated with labour market participation and wages over the life-course for men and women. Those with a higher PGS spend more time in employment and full-time employment and, when in employment, earn higher hourly wages. The employment…
The Mental Health of the Young in Latin America
We examine the mental wellbeing of the young in 18 Latin American countries using data from five cross-country comparative studies and both cross-sectional and quarterly time series data for a single country, Mexico. We examine whether there has been a decline in youth mental health and, if so, whether it has removed the U-shape in happiness and the hump-shape in unhappiness in Latin America as it has done in the United States and elsewhere. The …
Seasonality and the female happiness paradox
Most studies tracking wellbeing do not collect data across all the months in a year. This leads to error in estimating gender differences in wellbeing for three reasons. First, there are seasonal patterns in wellbeing (particularly life satisfaction and happiness) which are gendered, so failure to account for those confounds estimates of gender differences over time. Second, studies fielded in discrete parts of the year cannot extrapolate to gend…
The female happiness paradox
Using data across countries and over time, we show that women have worse mental health than men in negative affect equations, irrespective of the measure used — anxiety, depression, fearfulness, sadness, loneliness, anger — and they have more days with bad mental health and more restless sleep. Women are also less satisfied with many aspects of their lives, such as democracy, the economy, the state of education, and health services. They are also…
The wage curve after the Great Recession
Most economists maintain that the labour market in the USA (and elsewhere) is ‘tight’ because unemployment rates are low, and the Beveridge curve (the vacancies‐to‐unemployment ratio) is high. They infer from this that there is potential for wage‐push inflation. However, real wages fell rapidly in 2022, and prior to that, real wages had been stagnant for some time. We show that unemployment is not key to understanding wage formation in the USA, a…
Turning non-members into members
The adult consequences of being bullied in childhood
Most studies examining the impact of bullying on wellbeing in adulthood rely on retrospective measures of bullying and concentrate primarily on psychological outcomes. Instead, we examine the effects of bullying at ages 7 and 11, collected prospectively by the child's mother, on subjective wellbeing, labour market prospects, and physical wellbeing over the life-course. We exploit 12 sweeps of interview data through to age 62 for a cohort born in …
The Gender Well-Being Gap
Given recent controversies about the existence of a gender wellbeing gap we revisit the issue estimating gender differences across 55 SWB metrics-37 positive affect and 18 negative affect-contained in 8 cross-country surveys from 167 countries across the world, two US surveys covering multiple years and a survey for Canada. We find women score more highly than men on all negative affect measures and lower than men on all but three positive affect…
Wellbeing Rankings
Combining data on around four million respondents from the Gallup World Poll and the US Daily Tracker Poll we rank 164 countries, the 50 states of the United States and the District of Colombia on eight wellbeing measures. These are four positive wellbeing measures-life satisfaction, enjoyment, smiling and being well-rested-and four negative wellbeing variables-pain, sadness, anger and worry. Pooling the data for 2008-2017 we find country and sta…
Is pain associated with subsequent job loss? A panel study for Germany
The cross‐sectional association between pain and unemployment is well‐established. But the absence of panel data containing information on pain and labor market status has meant that less is known about the direction of any causal linkage. Those longitudinal studies that do examine the link between pain and subsequent labor market transitions suggest results are sensitive to the measurement of pain and model specification. We contribute to this l…
Discrimination in a Rank Order Contest
This paper examines discrimination in the NFL draft. The NFL is a favorable empirical setting to examine the role of skin color because franchise selectors are required to make rank-order judgements of players based on noisy signals of future productivity. Since wages are tightly related to the rank-order of the draft for the first four years of a player’s career, even if discrimination plays only a marginal role in selection, there could be a la…
Special ones? The effect of head coaches on football team performance
Using data from professional football leagues in four countries, we assess the effects on team performances following head coach turnover, distinguishing between voluntary and involuntary exits. We use entropy balancing to deal with the endogeneity of coach departures, by reweighting pre‐departure covariates to obtain a comparable control group. Results reveal little, if any, positive effect from either type of turnover, though some longer‐term b…
Are Women Doing It for Themselves? Female Managers and the Gender Wage Gap
Using linked employer‐employee data for Britain, we find a robust association between the share of female managers in the workplace and the size of the gender wage gap. In workplace fixed‐effects estimates, the gap is eradicated when more than 60% of workplace managers are women, a scenario that obtains in around one fifth of all workplaces. The association between the share of female managers and the gender wage gap is more pronounced when workp…
Union membership and job satisfaction over the life course
We examine the relationship between union membership and job satisfaction over the life‐course using data from the National Child Development Study (NCDS) tracking all those born in Great Britain in a single week in March in 1958 through to age 55 (2013). We find there is a significant negative correlation between union membership and job satisfaction that is apparent across the life‐course. Lagged union membership status going back many years is…
Taking the pulse of nations
Does better education mitigate risky health behavior? A mendelian randomization study
Education and risky health behaviors are strongly negatively correlated. Education may affect health behaviors by enabling healthier choices through higher disposable income, increasing information about the harmful effects of risky health behaviors, or altering time preferences. Alternatively, the observed negative correlation may stem from reverse causality or unobserved confounders. Based on the data from the Cardiovascular Risk in Young Finns…
The consequences of early menopause and menopause symptoms for labour market participation
Using a difference-in-difference estimator we identify the causal impact of early menopause and menopause symptoms on the time women spend in employment through to their mid-50s. We find the onset of early natural menopause (before age 45) reduces months spent in employment by 9 percentage points once women enter their 50s compared with women who do not experience early menopause. Early menopause is not associated with a difference in full-time e…
Does Pain Lead to Job Loss? A Panel Study for Germany
The cross-sectional association between pain and unemployment is well-established.But the absence of panel data containing data on pain and labor market status has meant less is known about the direction of any causal linkage.Those longitudinal studies that do examine the link between pain and subsequent labor market transitions suggest results are sensitive to the measurement of pain and model specification.We contribute to this literature using…
Unemployment and sleep
Does Employing Older Workers Affect Workplace Performance
Using a panel of workplaces in Britain, we investigate the implications for businesses of employing older workers. Workplace labor productivity falls where the proportion of older or younger workers rises. These raw associations are attenuated somewhat after controlling for aspects of human capital. In contrast, there is no significant association between age shares and workplace financial performance, suggesting that any reluctance by employers …
Do childhood infections affect labour market outcomes in adulthood and, if so, how
A burgeoning body of literature suggests that poor childhood health leads to adverse health outcomes, lower educational attainment and weaker labour market outcomes in adulthood. We focus on an important but under-researched topic, which is the role played by infection-related hospitalization (IRH) in childhood and its links to labour market outcomes later in life. The participants aged 24-30 years in 2001 N = 1706 were drawn from the Young Finns…
The gender gap in wages over the life course
We trace the gender wage gap (GWG) though a mid‐life peak for a cohort born in Britain in 1958 (National Child Development Study) to quantify their life‐course experience of equal and unequal opportunities. Taking hourly pay of full‐timers and part‐timers together, an initial gap between men and women widened substantially during childrearing years. Much, but not all, of the GWG is attributable to divergent work experience, especially in mid‐life…
Are You Happy While You Work
Using a new data source permitting individuals to record their well‐being via a smartphone, we explore within‐person variance in individuals’ well‐being measured momentarily at random points in time. We find paid work is ranked lower than any of the other 39 activities individuals can report engaging in, with the exception of being sick in bed. Precisely how unhappy one is while working varies significantly with where you work; whether you are co…
Pay equity after the Equality Act 2010
Analyses of linked employer-employee data for Britain indicate bisexual men earn 20 per cent less per hour than heterosexual men, ceteris paribus. There is no wage differential between gay and heterosexual men. Among women there is no wage gap between bisexuals and heterosexuals. However, lesbians are paid nearly 30 per cent less than heterosexual women, unless they are employed in a workplace with an equal opportunities policy which explicitly r…
Union Density Effects on Productivity and Wages
We exploit changes in tax subsidies for union members in Norway to identify the effects of changes in firm-level union density on productivity and wages. Increased deductions in taxable income for union members led to higher membership rates and contributed to a lower decline in union membership rates over time in Norway. Accounting for selection effects and the potential endogeneity of unionisation, the results show that increasing union density…
High‐involvement Management Practices, Trade Union Representation and Workplace Performance in Britain
Debates about Britain's productivity performance have often drawn attention to the roles played by working practices and employment relations. In the 1980s and 1990s, trade unions were a prime focus; more recently, attention has turned to high‐involvement management (HIM) practices (also referred to as ‘high‐performance work systems’). We combine the two to investigate the relationships between work organisation, trade union representation and wo…
Does employees’ subjective well-being affect workplace performance
This article uses linked employer–employee data to investigate the relationship between employees’ subjective well-being and workplace performance in Britain. The analyses show a clear, positive and statistically significant relationship between the average level of job satisfaction at the workplace and workplace performance. The relationship is present in both cross-sectional and panel analyses and is robust to various estimation methods and mod…
Online social networking and trade union membership
Union membership has declined precipitously in a number of countries, including in the United States, over the past fifty years. Can anything be done to stem this decline? This article argues that union voice is a positive attribute (among others) of union membership that is experiential in nature and that, unlike the costs of unionization, can be discerned only after exposure to a union. This makes the act of ‘selling’ unionism to workers (and t…
The Effects of Organizational Change on Worker Well-Being and the Moderating Role of Trade Unions
The authors explore the effects of organizational change on employee well-being using multivariate analyses of linked employer-employee data for Britain, with particular emphasis on whether unions moderate these effects. Nationally representative data consist of 13,500 employees in 1,238 workplaces. Organizational changes are associated with increased job-related anxiety and lower job satisfaction. The authors find that job-related anxiety is ame…
The sound of silence
Whether employees have ‘voice’ at work is determined, in large part, by employers' decisions as to whether to adopt a ‘voice’ regime. In Britain during the 1980s and 1990s, the employer's decision was largely unconstrained by the law. Under these conditions, we argue that whether an employer adopts a voice regime turns on employers' perceptions of the net benefits of worker voice to the firm. This is confirmed in empirical analyses that point to …
Wellbeing Rankings
Combining data on around four million respondents from the Gallup World Poll and the US Daily Tracker Poll we rank 164 countries, the 50 states of the United States and the District of Colombia on eight wellbeing measures. These are four positive wellbeing measures-life satisfaction, enjoyment, smiling and being well-rested-and four negative wellbeing variables-pain, sadness, anger and worry. Pooling the data for 2008-2017 we find country and sta…
Migrants and Low-Paid Employment in British Workplaces
Using nationally representative workplace data for Britain, we identify where migrants work and examine the partial correlation between workplace wages and whether migrants are employed at a workplace. Three-in-ten workplaces with five or more employees employ migrant workers, with the probability rising substantially with workplace size. We find the bottom quartile of the log earnings distribution is 4-5% lower in workplaces employing migrants, …
Positive employee attitudes
We propose a selective view of human resource management (HRM) that is guided by work motivation theory, arguing that one of the means by which firms achieve higher performance is by investing in certain forms of HRM practice that help fulfil intrinsic work values and thereby influence employees’ attitudes to their jobs and to the firm in a positive direction. Additionally, an accumulation of complementary practices has important communicative fu…
The Gender Well-Being Gap
Given recent controversies about the existence of a gender wellbeing gap we revisit the issue estimating gender differences across 55 SWB metrics-37 positive affect and 18 negative affect-contained in 8 cross-country surveys from 167 countries across the world, two US surveys covering multiple years and a survey for Canada. We find women score more highly than men on all negative affect measures and lower than men on all but three positive affect…
The adult consequences of being bullied in childhood
Most studies examining the impact of bullying on wellbeing in adulthood rely on retrospective measures of bullying and concentrate primarily on psychological outcomes. Instead, we examine the effects of bullying at ages 7 and 11, collected prospectively by the child's mother, on subjective wellbeing, labour market prospects, and physical wellbeing over the life-course. We exploit 12 sweeps of interview data through to age 62 for a cohort born in …
The gender gap in wages over the life course
We trace the gender wage gap (GWG) though a mid‐life peak for a cohort born in Britain in 1958 (National Child Development Study) to quantify their life‐course experience of equal and unequal opportunities. Taking hourly pay of full‐timers and part‐timers together, an initial gap between men and women widened substantially during childrearing years. Much, but not all, of the GWG is attributable to divergent work experience, especially in mid‐life…
Do higher wages come at a price
Slip Sliding Away
This paper presents the first comparative analysis of the decline in collective bargaining in two European countries where that decline has been among the most pronounced. Using establishment‐level data and a common model, we present decompositions of changes in collective bargaining in the private sector in Germany and Britain over the period 1998–2004. In both countries, within‐effects dominate compositional changes as the source of the recent …
The Wage Impact of Trade Unions in the UK Public and Private Sectors
There is a growing gap in the union membership wage premium between public and private‐sector workers in the United Kingdom. Using the Labour Force Surveys of 1993–2006, the gap between the membership premium in the public and private sectors closes with the addition of three‐digit occupational controls, although significant wage premia remain in both sectors. However, using the Workplace Employment Relations Survey of 2004, the public‐sector uni…
Turning non-members into members
The consequences of early menopause and menopause symptoms for labour market participation
Using a difference-in-difference estimator we identify the causal impact of early menopause and menopause symptoms on the time women spend in employment through to their mid-50s. We find the onset of early natural menopause (before age 45) reduces months spent in employment by 9 percentage points once women enter their 50s compared with women who do not experience early menopause. Early menopause is not associated with a difference in full-time e…
Does job design make workers happy
Using linked employer‐employee data for Finland we examine associations between job design, employee well‐being and job‐related stress. Three key findings stand out. First, in accordance with the theory of Karasek and Karasek and Theorell, job control and supervisory support are positively correlated with employee well‐being and negatively correlated with job‐related stress. Second, as predicted by theory, job demands are positively correlated wi…
Union effects on employee relations in Britain
I estimate the effects of trade unions on employee and employer perceptions of workplace management-employee relations in Britain using linked employer-employee data from the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey. Associations between these relations and unionization vary with institutional arrangements in relation to bargaining and lay representation. There is support for McCarthy’s view that union lay representatives can act as a ‘lubricant’…
Unions and Employment Growth in British Workplaces During the 1990s
This paper uses the 1990–1998 Workplace Industrial Relations Survey Panel to analyse the impact of unions on employment growth among private sector workplaces in Britain. The growth rate among unionised workplaces was roughly 3–4% per annum lower than among non‐unionised workplaces, ceteris paribus . The effect is not accounted for by the age of unionised workplaces, union concentration in declining industries, or organisational or technical chan…
Eligibility for income support and unemployment benefit after the social security act 1989
In 1988 (“Training for Employment,” Department of Employment 1988) the government gave notice of its concern that failure to seek work, ineffective job search methods, and the wage and occupational inflexibility of the claimant unemployed were a major cause of unemployment. This article explains how the Social Security Act 1989 has sought to alter claimants' behaviour in these respects
Notes on Clock and Watch Making; with Descriptions of several Antique Timekeepers deposited in the Museum
An account of the history of timekeeping and watchmaking in Britain and Europe. The article ends with a list of watches donated to the Society by the author, including any information he has on their makers or owners. Meeting notes for 21 May, 1860 are appended
Eligibility for income support and unemployment benefit after the social security act 1989
In 1988 (“Training for Employment,” Department of Employment 1988) the government gave notice of its concern that failure to seek work, ineffective job search methods, and the wage and occupational inflexibility of the claimant unemployed were a major cause of unemployment. This article explains how the Social Security Act 1989 has sought to alter claimants' behaviour in these respects
Permanent revolution
A new welfare-to-work regime is emerging in Britain, one that expects most working-age benefit claimants to be work-focused. Jobcentre Plus delivers the policy, using a range of welfare-to-work tools that reflect the complex underlying causes of unemployment. Many date back some years, but developments such as the introduction of a minimum wage, the New Deals and tax credits, mark a new departure. The successful delivery of this raft of programme…
Unions and Employment Growth in British Workplaces During the 1990s
This paper uses the 1990–1998 Workplace Industrial Relations Survey Panel to analyse the impact of unions on employment growth among private sector workplaces in Britain. The growth rate among unionised workplaces was roughly 3–4% per annum lower than among non‐unionised workplaces, ceteris paribus . The effect is not accounted for by the age of unionised workplaces, union concentration in declining industries, or organisational or technical chan…
High‐involvement Management Practices, Trade Union Representation and Workplace Performance in Britain
Debates about Britain's productivity performance have often drawn attention to the roles played by working practices and employment relations. In the 1980s and 1990s, trade unions were a prime focus; more recently, attention has turned to high‐involvement management (HIM) practices (also referred to as ‘high‐performance work systems’). We combine the two to investigate the relationships between work organisation, trade union representation and wo…
Union effects on employee relations in Britain
I estimate the effects of trade unions on employee and employer perceptions of workplace management-employee relations in Britain using linked employer-employee data from the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey. Associations between these relations and unionization vary with institutional arrangements in relation to bargaining and lay representation. There is support for McCarthy’s view that union lay representatives can act as a ‘lubricant’…
Special Reviewers
Voice at work…what do employers want? A symposium summary
Journal Article Voice at work...what do employers want? A symposium summary Get access Alex Bryson, Alex Bryson Rafael Gomez, Interdisciplinary Institute of Management, room G514, London School of Economics, London WC2A 2AE, UK Correspondence: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Rafael Gomez, Rafael Gomez Rafael Gomez, Interdisciplinary Institute of Management, room G514, London School of Eco…
The sound of silence
Whether employees have ‘voice’ at work is determined, in large part, by employers' decisions as to whether to adopt a ‘voice’ regime. In Britain during the 1980s and 1990s, the employer's decision was largely unconstrained by the law. Under these conditions, we argue that whether an employer adopts a voice regime turns on employers' perceptions of the net benefits of worker voice to the firm. This is confirmed in empirical analyses that point to …
Voice in the Wilderness? The Shift From Union to Non‐Union Voice in Britain
This article deals with the emergence, presence, and gradual transformation of workplace voice in Britain. Britain is an interesting case because it has sustained one of the longest and most prolonged falls in union representation in the Western world. Some have interpreted this as a move away from institutionalized voice by both workers and employers in the face of global product market competition and attendant needs for greater labour flexibil…
Survey errors and survey costs
A recent article in this journal provided a critique of the design of the Survey of Employees Questionnaire within the 2004 Workplace Employment Relations Survey. The principal criticisms concerned the use of vague response categories, double-barrelled questions, needless ordinal measurements and the use of multiple binary items in place of ordinal or scalar measures. The critique highlighted some areas worthy of attention but we argue that, in o…
Online social networking and trade union membership
Union membership has declined precipitously in a number of countries, including in the United States, over the past fifty years. Can anything be done to stem this decline? This article argues that union voice is a positive attribute (among others) of union membership that is experiential in nature and that, unlike the costs of unionization, can be discerned only after exposure to a union. This makes the act of ‘selling’ unionism to workers (and t…
Labor in the Information Age
This special issue on ‘Labor in the Information Age’ presents reviews of several works on communications from the 1990s and 2000s, many of which have escaped the notice of scholars in labor studies
The Wage Impact of Trade Unions in the UK Public and Private Sectors
There is a growing gap in the union membership wage premium between public and private‐sector workers in the United Kingdom. Using the Labour Force Surveys of 1993–2006, the gap between the membership premium in the public and private sectors closes with the addition of three‐digit occupational controls, although significant wage premia remain in both sectors. However, using the Workplace Employment Relations Survey of 2004, the public‐sector uni…
Slip Sliding Away
This paper presents the first comparative analysis of the decline in collective bargaining in two European countries where that decline has been among the most pronounced. Using establishment‐level data and a common model, we present decompositions of changes in collective bargaining in the private sector in Germany and Britain over the period 1998–2004. In both countries, within‐effects dominate compositional changes as the source of the recent …
Do higher wages come at a price
The Extent of Collective Bargaining and Workplace Representation
The institutions of collective bargaining and worker representation are eroding in many nations, not least in Germany and Britain. This is the first article to explore transitions into and out of these arrangements. Using successive waves of the German IAB Establishment Panel and both cross‐sectional and panel components of the British Workplace Employment Relations Survey for the period 1998–2004, we find industrial relations are in flux, with m…
Positive employee attitudes
We propose a selective view of human resource management (HRM) that is guided by work motivation theory, arguing that one of the means by which firms achieve higher performance is by investing in certain forms of HRM practice that help fulfil intrinsic work values and thereby influence employees’ attitudes to their jobs and to the firm in a positive direction. Additionally, an accumulation of complementary practices has important communicative fu…
The Effects of Organizational Change on Worker Well-Being and the Moderating Role of Trade Unions
The authors explore the effects of organizational change on employee well-being using multivariate analyses of linked employer-employee data for Britain, with particular emphasis on whether unions moderate these effects. Nationally representative data consist of 13,500 employees in 1,238 workplaces. Organizational changes are associated with increased job-related anxiety and lower job satisfaction. The authors find that job-related anxiety is ame…
Share Capitalism and Worker Wellbeing
Same or Different? The CEO Labour Market in China's Public Listed Companies
Using linked employer–employee data for all China's public listed firms over the period 2001–10, we find top executive compensation exhibits many of the traits familiar in the Western literature, although sometimes in a more muted way, and with some clear exceptions. We also find a role for managerial power in executive pay setting which may reflect the recency of the stock market and regulations underpinning corporate governance. Nevertheless, t…
Comparative Workplace Employment Relations
This comprehensive study provides a perceptive portrait of workplace employment relations in Britain and France using comparable data from two large-scale surveys: the British Workplace Employment Relations Survey (WERS) and the French Enquête Relations Professionnelles et Négociations d’Entreprise (REPONSE). These extensive linked employer-employee surveys provide nationally-representative data on private sector employment relations in all but t…
Productivity Puzzles Across Europe
A volume on labour productivity in Europe in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. It provides rationales for recent productivity trends in France, the UK, Germany, and Spain, and analyses policy responses to the crisis and how these have affected post-recession outcomes.
Comparative Workplace Employment Relations
Share capitalism and worker wellbeing
We show that worker wellbeing is determined not only by the amount of compensation workers receive but also by how compensation is determined. While previous theoretical and empirical work has often been preoccupied with individual performance-related pay, we find that the receipt of a range of group-performance schemes (profit shares, group bonuses and share ownership) is associated with higher job satisfaction. This holds conditional on wage le…
Economics (41 works) · Labour economics (27 works) · Psychology (27 works) · Employment and Welfare Studies (26 works) · Demographic economics (21 works) · Political science (21 works) · Business (19 works) · Labor Movements and Unions (16 works) · Sociology (16 works) · Social Psychology (15 works)