Random effects estimates using panel data for 42 colleges and universities over 16 years reveal that the economics faculty size of universities offering a Ph.D. in economics is determined primarily by the long-run average number of Ph.D. degrees awarded annually; the number of full-time faculty...

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...

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....

Taxation data have been used to create long-run series for the distribution of top incomes in quite a number of countries. Most of these studies have focused on the national experience of individual countries, but we can also learn from cross-country comparisons. Comparative analysis is...

The number of people who have ever experienced a divorce, or a split up of a non-marital union, is rising every year. It is well known that union dissolution has a disruptive effect on the housing careers of those involved, often leading to downward moves on the housing ladder. Much less is...

The issue of whether employees who work more hours than they want to suffer adverse health consequences is important not only at the individual level but also for governmental formation of work time policy. Our study investigates this question by analyzing the impact of the discrepancy between...

This paper examines the persistence of under-employment amongst UK higher education graduates. For the cohort of individuals who graduated in 2002/3, micro-data collected by the Higher Education Statistical Agency, are used to calculate the rates of non-graduate job employment 6 months and 42...

There is good reason to think that non-elite programs in economics may be producing relatively more research than in the past: Research expectations have been ramped-up at non-PhD institutions and new information technologies have changed the way academic knowledge is produced and exchanged....

Using a stochastic frontier approach this paper evaluates the effects of substantial changes in the teaching material on students learning efficiency. The results indicate that the main effects of the re-organization on the learning efficiency was a decreasing importance of students? attendance...

This paper presents an analysis of the failure and completion rates of graduate students in economics at three universities in The Netherlands. We find that an indicator of the research productivity of the supervisor is an important determinant of the completion and dropout rates. However, this...