The Blog at Quants Corner

Dr Matt Barnes The Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, has acknowledged the ‘vital contribution’ that public sector workers have made during the coronavirus pandemic and awarded above-inflation pay rises for almost 900,000 of them, including teachers, doctors and police officers.  Our new research suggests key workers do face lower pay than the average worker. And many of them also suffer from lower job quality, particularly in terms of the amount and timing of hours worked.  To analyse this, we used data from the Labour Force Survey (LFS) to produce a dataset of 25,000 people working in key worker jobs. We compared salaries alongside individual job quality indicators of each key worker profession.  Indicators of job quality* included whether workers are permanent members of staff, on zero hour contracts, work weekends or anti-social hours, part of a trade union, how often they fall ill at work and whether they have been offered any training in the previous three months.  This...

Dr Eric Harrison As the new academic year has started in blended, or in places entirely online, format, I’ve been more pre-occupied than usual by the ‘skills’ development of first year students. Most social science departments either offer dedicated modules in academic skills, incorporate them into other introductory modules, and/or direct students to useful materials made available centrally by the institution’s educational developers. I recently did a search through the main skills textbooks and I noticed that their content is still hugely skewed towards working with words. There are exceptions which have a chapter or two on numeracy (what we might now call ‘data literacy’) but overall, they’re dominated by the three ‘Rs’ of academic life: reading, writing, and referencing.  From a quants perspective this makes me a bit uneasy, because while we’re teaching students the importance of arguments and evidence in social science, we’re only offering half the tools needed to evaluate th...