Twenty-five years ago, in a small closed-down shop inHighbury, the idea of helping some people into workthrough their own bootstraps was tried out in some ofLondon’s poorest communities. It relied on the motivationand basic willingness to learn of people out of work and inneed. The missing...

This paper examines the impact of the Working Families Tax Credit (WFTC) on employment retention and advancement. The WFTC, which replaced Family Credit in October 1999, supplemented earnings of low paid workers living in low income families. It was designed to increase the financial incentive...

In April 2002 Jobcentre Plus started to operate in the UK bringing together theservice of the Benefits Agency and the Employment Service. Offering a fullyintegrated benefit claiming and work placement/job-seeking service for peopleof working age this new organisation aims to strengthen the link...

We analyze a simple and tractable model of occupational choice in the presence of credit marketimperfections. We examine the effect of parameters governing technology and transaction costs, andhistory, in terms of the initial wealth distribution, in determining the long-term wealth...

We study market inefficiencies and policy remedies when agents choose their occupations, and entrepreneurialtalent is subject to private information. Untalented entrepreneurs depress the returns to entrepreneurshipbecause of adverse selection. The severity of this problem depends on the outside...

Using data from Sierra Leone, I explore the role of cognitive ability in sorting across sectors and the importance of perceptions in the employment decision-making process. Crucial to the analysis is the introduction of the aid-industry/development sector as a 'third sector', which is shown to...

This note develops a method of recovering individual preferences, and of obtaining money-metricindividual welfare comparisons, from demand functions generated by Cournot-Nash equilibria ingames with public goods.

We introduce pollution, as a by-product of production, into a non-tournament model of R&Dwith spillovers. Technology policy takes the form of either R&D subsidisation or pre-competitiveR&D cooperation. We show that, when the emissions tax is exogenous, the optimal R&Dsubsidy can be negative,...

This note investigates the extension of Roberts' price-independent welfare prescriptions toalternatives in which population size and composition can vary. We show that ethicallyunsatisfactory orderings result. Suppose that a single person is to be added to a populationthat is unaected in utility...