Countries often spend billions on university research. There is growing interest in how to assess whether that money is well spent. Is there an objective way to assess the quality of a nation's world-leading science? I attempt to suggest a method, and illustrate it with modern data on economics....

We provide empirical support for the contention that within-job wage growth relates purely to job-specific performance and that returns to general experience are assessed at the point of job change. Using the British New Earnings Survey panel data we identify job changes that take place both...

We study worker turnover in a transition economy to investigate to what extent the length of time a worker has been employed by a firm shapes the turnover process. Using data from the Polish Labor Force Survey and The Russian Longitudinal Monitor Survey we compare the pattern of turnover with a...

In recent years the National Health Service (NHS) in Britain has experienced an acute shortage of qualified nurses. This has placed issues of recruitment and retention in the profession high on the political agenda. In this paper we investigate the determinants of job satisfaction for nurses,...

Around 40% of the male workforce regularly works 8 to 9 hours a week of paid overtime. This paper investigates the determinants of overtime hours in Britain over the period 1975-1999. For this purpose a panel data Tobit model is estimated using the very large panel of employees from the National...

This paper investigates the determinants of racial harassment at the workplace and its impact, via job satisfaction, on intentions to quit. Using data for ethnic minority nurses in Britain, we find that nearly 40% of nurses have experienced racial harassment from work colleagues, whilst more...

Microeconomic theory predicts that under certain regularity conditions higher idiosyncratic risk increases the propensity to insure against independent marketable risks. We apply these predictions to the specific case of labor income risk and car insurance using data from the UK. The main...

Using the British New Earnings Survey Panel Data (NESPD) for the period 1975 to 2001 we estimate the wage cyclicality of job stayers (those remaining within single jobs in a given company), within company job movers, and between company job movers. We also examine how the proportion of internal...

Looking across many diseases, average health among mature men is much worse in America compared to England. Second, there exists a steep negative health gradient for men in both countries where men at the bottom of the economic hierarchy are in much worse health than those at the top. This...

Low birth weight has considerable short and long-term consequences and leads to high costs to the individual and society even in a developed economy. Low birth weight is partially a consequence of choices made by the mother pre- and during pregnancy. Thus policies affecting these choices could...