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Every year many thousands of people make claims for damages following an accident, with the Department for Work and Pensions Compensation Recovery Unit recording just over 1 million in 2011-12. Cardiff researchers developed an improved method of calculating compensation involving future loss of earnings and in doing so demonstrated that claimants had previously been undercompensated. The new approach achieves greater consistency, accuracy and equity in awards and, as of the Sixth Edition, has been incorporated into the Government Actuary Department's Actuarial Tables for Personal Injury and Fatal Accident Cases (the `Ogden Tables'). In England and Wales, these tables are used by lawyers and the courts as a starting point in the determination of compensation awards for all future losses and expenditure in cases of personal injury. They also provide guidance in other jurisdictions where the law is based on English common law (former colonies) and which rely upon scheduled damages. Dr Victoria Wass of Cardiff Business School (CBS) was central to the research and to the subsequent training of legal practitioners in the application of the new methodology.
Professor Pedro Martins' research expertise is on labour economics, including dismissals, wages and social returns of education. From June 2011 until February 2013, he was seconded from Queen Mary to undertake the key role of Portuguese Secretary of State for Employment. Informed by his research, he initiated and implemented a programme of effective labour market legislative reforms over a relatively short period of time. A reformed labour code (four changes of law) and several ordnances, resolutions and other policy change were the outcome, affecting individual dismissals, working time, collective bargaining, training and active labour market policies. His aim was to reduce unemployment by partly deregulating the labour market, so reducing the disincentives for firms to employ people, and by promoting active labour market policies to raise skill levels within the economy. The reforms affected approximately five million people. Following the reforms, Portugal moved to eighth place (in 2009 it was first) out of 34 countries in terms of the strength of permanent employees' protection (OECD Employment Outlook 2012); and unemployment fell, from 17.7% to 15.6%, and GDP increased, by 1.3%, between the first and third quarters of 2013.
The research outlined below was instrumental in the development of a new classification of graduate occupations, beyond a dichotomous graduate/non-graduate distinction, which has become a standard typology for analysing the graduate labour market. Policymakers and research bodies, such as HECSU and Universities UK, have used it to better understand the impact of higher education, labour market and wider social policy reform, such as migration policy. Most UK HEIs have used this typology to compare employment outcomes for their graduates and it has also proved to be an important point of reference for careers advisors and students to aid educational and career decision-making.
The impact of the research programme led to advice being provided to inward-investment companies on labour supply; to the re-working of the Northern Ireland Department of Employment and Learning's [DEL] training provision; to participation on the government's Task Force charged with re-integrating the unemployed into the labour force and to formulating the Northern Ireland [NI] response to the UK-wide welfare reform agenda. The research covered company recruitment experiences, spatial behaviour and perceptions of young people and benefit claimants, and the views of Job Centre advisors. It found that targeting jobs to deprived areas did not necessarily bring jobs to residents of these areas, that recruitment experiences were dependent on locational context, that some people are in a low mobility trap, and that advisors sometimes find it difficult to assimilate rapidly changing policies.
Research on the post-apartheid South African labour market showed high levels of economic inactivity among black people concentrated in certain areas and high employee turnover among these groups. An integrated development programme was developed in and around Port Elizabeth tailored to address specific failings in labour market supply and demand identified by the research findings. This brought greatly improved employment rates for over 3,000 participating job seekers, with more than 80% achieving a positive outcome in terms of employment or further training. Furthermore, the programme reduced turnover rates for those employers involved in the project, and built the capacity of Union workforce representatives. The development programme comprising integrated training workshops and employer support is now being rolled out across South Africa.
Graduated period life tables for men and women, based on the mortality experience of the population of England and Wales, have been published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) using data from the 2001 Census. These tables are the sixteenth in a series known as the English Life Tables which are associated with decennial population censuses, beginning with the Census of 1841. Errors in crude census data owing to the small numbers of deaths involved, particularly in childhood and at very advanced ages, can be reduced by a statistical process of smoothing. A smoothing methodology developed at Cass Business School, City University London has been used in the latest ONS Decennial Life Tables. The tables show the increasing longevity of the population of England and Wales over a long period. The impact of this research is broad as life tables are used extensively in pensions planning, demography, insurance, economics and medicine. Life tables using this statistical smoothing methodology have also been prepared for Scotland, Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland and Canada.
Bell and Blanchflower's research on youth unemployment has been highly influential in affecting policy directions in both the UK and Europe during the Great Recession. It has also generated substantial public concern for a `lost generation' of unemployed young people through their sustained engagement in media and public debate.