We examine trends in wage inequality in the US and other countries over the past four decades. We show that there has been a secular increase in the 90-50 wage differential in the US and the UK since the late 1970s. By contrast the 50-10 differential rose mainly in the 1980s and flattened or...

Labor’s share of GDP in most OECD countries has declined over the last two decades. Some authors have suggested that these changes are linked to deregulation of product and labor markets. To examine this we focus on a large quasi-experiment in the OECD: the privatization of many network...

Despite mounting empirical evidence to the contrary, the literature on predictability of stock returns almost uniformly assumes a time-invariant relationship between state variables and returns. In this paper we propose a two-stage approach for forecasting of financial return series that are...

This paper proposes new performance decomposition measures that allow one to analyse the sources of returns on the international equity holdings of a large cross-section of UK pension funds. Our results suggest that the pension funds earned negative returns both from international market timing...

This paper analyses the international equity holdings of a large panel of UK pension funds. We find considerable evidence of market timing activity, as illustrated by the funds' decision to scale back their investments in the US stock market during the 1990s. To explain this we model portfolio...

Despite pension fund managers being largely unconstrained in their investment decisions, this paper reports evidence of clustering in the performance of a large cross-section of UK pension fund managers around the median fund manager. This finding is explained in terms of the predominance of a...

We analyse the role of financial sector workers in the huge rise of the share of earnings going to those at the very top of the pay distribution in the UK. Rising bankers' bonuses accounted for two-thirds of the increase in the share of the top 1% after 1999. Surprisingly, bankers' share of...

We consider performance measurement and evaluation for managed funds. Similarities and differences−both in econometric practice and in interpretation of outcomes of empirical tests−between performance measurement and conventional asset pricing models are analyzed. We also discuss how...