Since 1997, the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) has met monthly to set the UK policy interest rate. We examine evidence of systematic patterns in exchange rate movements on MPC days over the first decade of operation of the MPC. Daily data reveal significant differences in...

This paper investigates the robustness of recent findings on the effect of parental background on child health. We are particularly concerned with the extent to which their finding that income effects on child health are the result of spurious correlation rather than some causal mechanism. A...

Following Meade (1978), we reconsider issues in the design of taxes on corporate income. We outline developments in economies and in economic thought over the last thirty years, and investigate how these developments should affect the design of taxes on corporate income. We consider a number of...

This paper addresses the intergeneration transmission of education and investigates the extent to which early school leaving (at age 16) may be due to variations in permanent income, parental education levels, and shocks to income at this age. Least squares estimation reveals conventional...

This paper describes the characteristics of manufacturing establishments in Britain over the period 1980 to 1996. Particular attention is paid to differences between plants of different ownership nationality. The findings suggest that establishments that are always foreign-owned have...

This paper studies the determinants of partnership dissolution and focuses on the role of child support. We exploit the variation in child support liabilities driven by an important UK policy reform to separately identify the effects of children from the effect of child support liability. We...

We investigate the relationship between the location of private sector R&D labs and university research departments in Great Britain. We combine establishment-level data on R&D activity with information on levels and changes in research quality from the Research Assessment Exercise. The...

This paper develops a general test of factor price equalization that is robust to unobserved regional productivity differences, unobserved region-industry factor quality differences and variation in production technology across industries. We test relative factor price equalization across...

This paper examines the socio-economic consequences of teenage motherhood for a cohort of British women born in 1970. We apply a number of different methodologies on the same dataset, including OLS, a propensity score matching estimator, and an instrumental variables estimator, using...

We examine whether discretionary government grants influence the location of new plants, and how effective these incentives are in the presence of agglomeration and urbanisation externalities. We find evidence that regional industrial structure affects the location of new entrants. Firms in more...