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Examining the process of job mobility and its effect on earnings, the authors find that this particular labour market is characterised by a high incidence of specific training, that upward mobility is largely experienced within the same organisation and is mainly of the osmotic type. It is felt that a technique must be devised to measure osmotic mobility accurately.

This article is not the work of an expert on the period in question (see Robinson, 1971; Rheinwald, 1977); rather it is a commentary on a book whose half‐century has just passed almost unnoticed. In a sense the argument involves a further visit to what J.A. Schumpeter once described as the “lumber room” of historical knowledge, although this particular visit is prompted neither by nostalgia nor piety, but rather by the conviction that Chamberlin still has much to teach those interested in the theory of the firm and in the wider area of industrial economics. The article is also prompted by the conviction that the conventional textbook accounts of Chamberlin's work have introduced misleading simplifications in pursuing the qualities of coherence and precision in the presentation of ideas.

It has long been recognised that cohort and cross‐sectional age‐earnings profiles differ. A standard procedure, which is quite reasonable in the absence of more information, is to obtain a cohort profile by simply adding the general rate of growth of real earnings to the growth of earnings associated with age, as shown by cross‐sectional data. Indeed, this would seem to be supported by the observation that cross‐sectional earnings profiles for a number of different years show a great deal of stability in their general shape. The main question considered here is whether cohort profiles can in fact be estimated in this simple way. A basic statistical model of age‐earnings profiles is described in the next section. The model is then applied to several groups of professional scientists, chemists and physicists in Britain and Australia, in the third section. The data were obtained from special surveys of career histories and are described briefly in the Appendix. A feature of the surveys is that sufficient data were collected to enable separate analyses of male and female scientists to be carried out.

In the last decade there has been considerable interest in the analysis of Trade Union behaviour, but surprisingly little discussion of the effect of tax changes on wage demands. Previous analyses have been limited by the use of simple tax structures. The discussion is extended by considering a multi‐rate tax system that can easily be applied to most countries. The effect on unions′ wage demands of eliminating the top marginal tax rate, while raising VAT, is examined in detail. It is shown that this policy can be expected to lead to an increase in the wage demands of all unions, producing a once‐and‐for‐all increase in nominal wages and unemployment.

Provides a framework for analysing the financing of state pensions with a wide range of policy options. Special attention is given, however, to two special cases: the first involves a means‐tested pension similar to the Australian scheme, while the second is similar to the basic pension (the first tier) in the UK. Emphasis is given to the implications of population ageing for pension finance in each scheme; a range of policies can be considered using specially designed computer programs.

The problems involved in trying to measure the effect of the budget on the distribution of lifetime income are reviewed. A comparison is made of the likely differences between the stylised facts of annual incidence studies and the possible lifetime impact of the budget. Annual studies show that redistribution to the poor occurs, primarily as a result of pensions. It is likely that the lifetime incidence of the budget is broadly neutral since pensions will not accrue mainly to the lowest deciles when a lifetime income perspective is taken.

This paper uses a lifetime income simulation model to examine the effects on inequality and progressivity of extending the time period over which income is measured. The income tax schedule typically displays increasing marginal rates, and there is a substantial amount of relative income mobility, along with a systematic variation in average incomes over the life cycle of the cohort. Simulations show that progressivity and inequality measures can often move in opposite directions, both over time for annual accounting periods, and as the length of period is gradually increased. The relationship between summary measures is complicated by the role of the aggregate tax ratio, in addition to the re‐ranking that can occur in the larger period framework. Some tax structures are found to increase in progressivity, while others show less progressivity, as the time period increases. Re‐ranking is found to increase as the accounting period increases: it is higher and increases more rapidly as the accounting period is increased for tax structures displaying more steeply rising rate structures.

Although there has been a great deal of discussion of the relative merits of alternative income maintenance schemes, the precise relationships between benefit levels and tax rates required are not usually examined in detail. The purpose of the present article is, therefore, to provide comparable results for a number of systems so that the “trade‐offs” involved can easily be examined and compared. The majority of results are quite general, and do not depend on the form of the distribution of gross income, but in common with other analyses it has not been possible to allow for incentive effects. Some of the schemes have been examined elsewhere, but the results presented below provide a much more unified and simplified set of comparisions. While fairly simple results may be obtained for the relationships between taxes and benefits, it is much more difficult to provide convenient expressions for the dispersion of post‐transfer income. However, a method of calculating the coefficient of variation of post‐transfer income is presented in the final section of this article.

Introduction The literature on earnings change has increasingly suggested that the key processes generating earnings inequality are those operating within the firm. However, there has been little empirical work on these phenomena, largely reflecting data deficiencies. Very few data‐sets on earnings contain information about internal processes and those which do often measure them narrowly. For example, most surveys of labour mobility define it either as movement between firms or as such movement plus major, once‐and‐for‐all changes of work type.

Examines, using a simple model, the choice of appropriate contributions of taxes and fees used to finance higher education. A two‐period model is developed in which individuals in cohort invest in higher education in the first period, and the interdependences between educational choice and the tax system are considered. The implications of majority voting and the maximization of a social welfare function, allowing for a trade‐off between equity and efficiency, are examined in progressive and proportional tax systems.