After his MPhil, Manning began working at Birkbeck College as lecturer, a position that he held until 1989 when he moved to another lectureship at the London School of Economics.
[5] Alan Manning's research concentrates on labour economics, with a focus on unemployment, minimum wages, monopsony, immigration and gender pay gaps in the UK and Europe.
[10] In the late 1980s, in work with George Alogoskoufis, Manning argued that workers' reluctance to reduce their wage expectations, along with firms' slow adjustment of employment, was among the main reasons for persistently high European unemployment.
In the mid-2000s, in the wake of research by Autor, Levy and Murnane, Manning argued that the demand for the least-skilled jobs may be growing, albeit dependent on the physical proximity to the more-skilled.
[30] In his most highly cited publication, together with Maarten Goos, Manning showed that the UK had experienced since 1975 a pattern of polarization with rises in employment shares in the highest- and lowest-wage occupations and a "hollowing out" of medium-wage occupations, a pattern consistent with Autor et al.'s "routinization" hypothesis; for the 1970s to the 1990s, this polarization accounts for, respectively, half and one third of the growth in wage inequality in the upper and lower parts of the UK wage distribution.
[31] This finding – the concentration of employment in low- and high-paid jobs with high non-routine task contents – was maintained in further research by Manning and Goos with Anna Salomons on overall Europe,[32] wherein routine-biased technological change and offshoring play key roles.
For instance, together with Dustmann, Glitz and Algan, he found that in the UK, France and partly also in Germany, the gap between natives and immigrants in terms of educational achievement decreases over generations, though overall in all three countries the labour market performance of most immigrant groups as well as their descendants is still generally worse than that of natives, even if differences in education, regional allocation and experience are taken into account.