The Wage and Employment Dynamics Project – a collaboration between the University of the West of England, City University, UCL and the University of Stirling – has been awarded a grant by UKRI to develop a new research-ready dataset that will support future research on earnings in the labour market.
The project will link anonymised person records from the 2021 Census for England and Wales to those in the longitudinal Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE). The project will also refresh the existing linkage between ASHE and the 2011 Census for England and Wales using a new linkage methodology. Together, these activities will provide the research and policy communities with a uniquely powerful longitudinal ASHE-Census dataset, which will give new insights into wage inequalities and wage progression in the labour market.
Background:
In the ADR-funded Wage and Employment Dynamics Strategic Impact Project (WED), we partnered with the Office for National Statistics (ONS) to link person records from ASHE to person records from the 2011 Census for England and Wales. This enabled us to add employee demographic characteristics such as ethnicity and disability status to around three-quarters (74%) of the 2011 ASHE records held by employees in England and Wales. The ASHE-2011 Census linked dataset is already enabling researchers in government and academia to explore how factors such as ethnicity, disability, education, country of birth and household circumstances affect individual’s wage levels and pay progression (see here). However, the linked data would be more powerful if it could also take advantage of information from the most recent 2021 Census.
In the new project, we will work with ONS to link person records from the 2021 Census for England and Wales to the longitudinal ASHE, using a new and improved linkage protocol (ONS’ Reference Data Management Framework, RDMF). The RDMF will also be used to relink ASHE to the 2011 Census for England and Wales, generating a longitudinal ASHE-Census dataset spanning at least a decade. The linkages between ASHE and Census will be quality assessed and documented. The project will focus on generating research-ready data, supported by a program of training and user support.
The resulting longitudinal ASHE-Census dataset will represent a significant improvement in the UK’s data infrastructure for labour market research, providing more reliable earnings data, larger samples, and better employer information, than is currently available from existing household surveys. The data will enable researchers to generate fresh insights into the experiences of employees, enabling policymakers to make better-informed decisions.
Work on the project will begin in July 2024. The first edition of the new ASHE-Census dataset is expected to be available by Spring 2025.
The existing ASHE-2011 Census dataset is currently available to researchers via the ONS Secure Research Service. A user guide and other introductory material are available here.
Contact: john.forth@city.ac.uk