This paper analyses and quantifies the effects of trade liberalisation and skill-biased technical change, both exogenous and trade-induced, on the skill premium and real wages of unskilled and skilled workers in the Mexican manufacturing sector, using industry- and firm-level data for 1984-1990...

We construct a unique panel dataset to examine how R&D and intellectual property (IP), via patents and trade marks, increase firm productivity. Knowledge has public good characteristics of non-depletability and non-excludability. Even with IP, imitation and inventing around other firm`s products...

This paper uses novel data on trade mark activity of UK manufacturing and service sector firms to investigate whether trade marks improve the profitability and productivity of firms. We first analyse Tobin`s q, the ratio of stock market value to book value of tangible assets. We then investigate...

This paper develops a sequential learning estimator of production functions and productivity dynamics for unbalanced establishment panels. Extending an idea from the literature on dynamic industry models, establishments are uncertain about their own idiosyncratic productivities and update...

To what extent does the policy of Tony Blair`s government reflect the traditional aspirations of social democracy? In macroeconomic policy the emphasis has been on stability, an understandable response to recent UK economic history, but one which has left sterling dangerously overvalued for an...

We propose to measure inequality of well-being with a multidimensional generalization of the Gini coefficient.  We derive two inequality indices from their underlying social evaluation functions.  These functions are conceived as a double aggregation functions: one across the dimensions of...

The decline in the importance of tradeable goods production in providing employment has continued in the past decade; distribution, public services and business and financial services all provide more jobs than tradeable goods. Manufacturing output has stagnated under New Labour despite rapid growth...

The paper reviews the macroeconomic data describing the British economy from 1760 to 1913 and shows that it passed through a two stage evolution of inequality. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the real wage stagnated while output per worker expanded. The profit rate doubled and the...

Turning Europe into a leading `global knowledge-based` economy has become something of an obsession for policy-makers in the EU. From the integrated guidelines of the Lisbon Agenda to the July 2005 announcement of a new scientific European Research Council, considerable effort has been directed...

This paper attempts to establish the trend of market development in Europe in the centuries before the industrial revolution, by applying three different measures of market integration to a compilation of monthly and annual price data. In contrast to much of the existing work, which suggests...