We argue that incorporating the decision of how to organize the acquisition, use, and communication of knowledge into economic models is essential to understand a wide variety of economic phenomena. We survey the literature that has used knowledge-based hierarchies to study issues like the...

Charles Clarke has recently described England as having "a weak offer for those who want a vocational orientation to their studies." This discussion paper analyzes the weaknesses of vocational education in this country and suggests how to remedy them. <br><br> Vocational education should be about...

This review article tries to answer four questions: (i) what are the stylized facts about uncertainty over time; (ii) why does uncertainty vary; (iii) do fluctuations in uncertainty matter; and (iv) did higher uncertainty worsen the Great Recession of 2007-2009? On the first question both macro...

Higher income is associated with greater well-being, but do income gains and losses impact on well-being differently? Loss aversion, whereby losses loom larger than gains, is typically examined with relation to decisions about anticipated outcomes. Here, using subjective well-being data from...

We discuss the contribution of the experimental literature to the understanding of both traditional and previously unexplored dimensions of gender differences and discuss their bearings on labor market outcomes. Experiments have offered new findings on gender discrimination, and while they have...

Over the last decade the World Management Survey (WMS) has collected firm-level management practices data across multiple sectors and countries. We developed the survey to try to explain the large and persistent TFP differences across firms and countries. This review paper discusses what has...

If official figures overstated the growth of banking output in the UK in the recent boom, does this mean that GDP growth was overstated too? The answer is no. It is truer to say that if banking output was overstated then the output of some other industry or industries must have been understated,...

1. Human happiness is more affected by whether or not one has a job than by what kind of job it is. 2. Thus, when jobs are to hand, we should insist that unemployed people take them. This involves a much more pro-active placement service and clearer conditionality than applies in many countries....

Latin America and the Caribbean have become in the last decade or so a formidable laboratory for the design and implementation of innovative social policies. In the face of an unprecedented surge in the number of non-contributory social assistance benefit programs in the region, there is a...

The pay of financial sector workers ("bankers") is a focus of public concern especially since the onset of the financial crisis. We document the remarkable rise in the share of aggregate pay going to those at the very top of the distribution over the last decade in the UK and highlight the role...