Laboratory experiments are a widely used methodology for advancing causal knowledge in the physical and life sciences. With the exception of psychology, the adoption of laboratory experiments has been much slower in the social sciences, although during the last two decades, the use of lab...

We compute the productivity gaps in manufacturing industries by urban, rural less sparse and rural sparse locations in the UK. This is done by using firm-specific total factor productivities, which are estimated by a semi-parametric algorithm within 4-digit manufacturing industries using FAME...

The comparative study of debt and fiscal consolidation has acquired a new focus with the re-emergence of debt as a major problem consequent upon the global financial crisis. This leads us to re-evaluate the literature on fiscal consolidation that flourished during the 1980s and 1990s. We...

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...

In a recent paper, Kanazawa and Kovar (2004) assert that given certain empirical regularities about assortative mating and the heritability of intelligence and beauty, that it logically follows that more intelligent people are more beautiful. It is argued here that this theoremʺ is false and...

This paper reports estimates of the UK college premiumʺ for young graduates across successive cohorts from large cross section datasets for the UK pooled from 1994 to 2006 - a period when the higher education participation rate increased dramatically. The growth in relative labour demand...

We estimate a model of labor supply and participation in multiple programs for UK lone mothers which exploits a reform of in-work transfers. Cash entitlements increased but eligibility to in-kind child nutrition programs was lost. We find that in-work cash and inwork in-kind transfers both have...

Objectives. To investigate the relationship between breastfeeding duration and cognitive development using longitudinal survey data. The World Health Organisation (WHO) and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommend exclusive breastfeeding until six months post-partum and a combination...

Using counterfactual microsimulations, Shapley decompositions of time change in inequality and poverty indices make it possible to disentangle and quantify the relative effect of tax-benefit policy changes, compared to all other effects including shifts in the distribution of market income....