A startling fact of firm level productivity analysis is the large and persistent differences in both labour productivity and total factor productivity (TFP) between firms in narrowly defined sectoral classes. The competitiveness of an industry is potentially an important factor explaining this...

Much of recent Trade theory focuses on heterogeneity of firms and the differential impacttrade policy might have on firms with different levels of productivity. A common problem isthat most firm level dataset do not contain information on output prices of firms which makesit difficult to...

In this paper we compare the level, composition and distribution of household wealth in five industrial countries: the UK, US, Italy, Finland and Sweden. We exploit the harmonized data within the Luxembourg Wealth Study, which we have extended to allow us to examine trends in the UK and the US...

This study uses a longitudinal data source to study the effects of conflict-induced displacement on labour market outcomes for Bosnians in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina. To account for endogeneity in the displacement status, I exploit the fact that the level of violence in the pre-war...

Governments around the world want to develop their ICT and digital industries. Policymakers thus need a clear sense of the size and characteristics of digital businesses, but this is hard to do with conventional datasets and industry codes. This paper uses innovative ‘big data’ resources to...

This paper adopts a counterfactual decomposition analysis to analyse cross-country differences in the size of household wealth and levels of household wealth inequality. The findings of the paper suggest that the biggest share of cross-country differences is not due to differences in the...

Although most US income inequality research is based on public-use March CPS data, a new wave of research using IRS tax-return data reports substantially faster inequality growth for recent years. We show that these apparently inconsistent estimates are largely reconciled when the income...

In this paper we examine the concept of "vulnerability" (Townsend 1994) within the context of income mobility of the poor. We test for the dynamics of vulnerable households in the UK using Waves 1 - 12 of the British Household Panel Survey and find that, of three different types of risks that we...

The second-order stochastic dominance criterion for inequality analysis introduced by Atkinson (1970) covers nearly all well-known inequality indices. The same cannot be said, in respect of poverty indices, for the second-order stochastic dominance criterion for poverty analysis introduced by...