A search for key sectors in the UK economy is undertaken, in terms of those generating labour cost saving and product improvements, the effect from which spill over into the remainder of the economy.

Fingold and Soskice (1988) argue that Britain is trapped in a "low-skills" equilibrium. In Redding (1996), this notion is formalized in a dynamic model which relies on strategic complementarities between firms' investments in R&D and workers' investments in human capital. In this paper, we...

In this paper, we first present a summary of the literature dealing with the question of the existence of externalities of employer provided and funded training. Using French data, we then estimate the impact of this kind of training on wages, while paying special attention to the mobility after...

We develop a model of endogenous skill-biased technical change in developing countries.  The model reconciles wildly dispersed existing estimates of the elasticity of substitution between more and less educated workers.  It also produces an estimating equation for the elasticity, which allow...

Jewish emancipation in nineteenth century Europe produced drastically different responses.  In Germany, a liberal variant known as Reform developed, while ultra-Orthodox Judaism emerged in eastern Europe.  We develop a model of religious organization which explains this polarization.  In...

We use a sharp, exogenous and repeated change in the value of leisure to identify the impact of student effort on educational achievement.  The treatment arises from the partial overlap of the world's major international football tournaments with the exam period in England.  Our data enable a...

In this paper, I study how an increase in the use of new work practices that involve multi-tasking has affected the returns to experience.  If each task in a job has a concave learning curve, then increasing the number of tasks may increase the returns to experience.  Using the Panel Study of...

We examine the shareholder wealth effects of takeover defenses by developing a model in which takeovers facilitate the implementation of technological innovations. In the rational expectations equilibrium of the model with explicit contracts, we show that takeover defenses are deployed to insure...

In human capital intensive industries where it is difficult to contract upon the training effort of skilled agents a socially suboptimal level of training may occur. We show how partnership organisations can overcome this problem by tying human and financial capital. Partnerships are opaque so...

Until 1970, the New York Stock Exchange prohibited public incorporation of member firms. After the rules were relaxed to allow joint stock firm membership, investment-banking concerns organized as partnerships or closely-held private corporations went public in waves, with Goldman Sachs (1999)...