This proposal involves the establishment of ‘welfare accounts’ for every person in a country. There are four accounts: a retirement account (covering pensions), an unemployment account (covering unemployment support), a human capital account (covering education and training), and a health...

This paper discusses how employment vouchers should depend on age in a simple overlapping generations model in which workers are either young or old. We find that young workers should receive higher vouchers as displacement of the old rises and as the deadweight loss from providing vouchers to...

Using two matched plant level skills and productivity datasets for UK manufacturing we document that (i) more productive firms hire more skilled workers: in 2000, plants at the top decile of the TFP distribution (controlling for their four-digit industry) hired workers with, on average, around...

This paper explores the optimal design of subsidies for hiring unemployed workers (‘employment vouchers’ for short) in the context of a simple macroeconomic model of the labour market. Focusing on the short-term and long-term effects of the vouchers on employment and unemployment, the...

The paper explores the employment implications of allowing people the opportunity of using a portion of their incapacity benefits to provide employment vouchers for employers that hire them. The analysis indicates that introducing this policy could increase employment, raise the incomes of...

We estimate the impact of skilled and unskilled labour shortages on productivity and wages in the United Kingdom. Skill shortages are higher on average and more variable over the business cycle in the United Kingdom than in comparable economies. Unskilled shortages are comparatively rare, so...

This paper develops a dynamic Heckscher Ohlin Samuelson model with sector-specific human capital and overlapping generations to characterize the dynamics and welfare implications of gradual labor market adjustment to trade. Our model is tractable enough to yield sharp analytic results, that...

An enormous number of empirical papers have estimated technical efficiency, the distance of firms inside a frontier, following the model of Farrell (1957). We propose a theory that explains the distance these empirical papers seek to measure. The theory is based on the idea that workers can...

We use a new sample of UK female identical twins to estimate private economic returns to education. We report findings in three areas. First, we use identical twins, to control for family effects and genetic ability bias, and the education reported by the other twin to control for schooling...