We use UK micro data to explore whether planning regulation reduced UK retailing productivity growth between 1997 and 2003. We document a shift to smaller shops, particularly within supermarket chains, following a regulatory change in 1996 which increased the costs of opening large stores. This...

A central concern about immigration is the integration into the labour market, not only of the first generation, but also of subsequent generations. Little comparative work exists for Europe's largest economies. France, Germany and the UK have all become, perhaps unwittingly, countries with...

Pressure on public finances has increased scrutiny of public support for innovation. We examine two particular issues. First, there have been many recent calls for the (relatively new) UK R&D subsidy to be extended to other research activities, such as software. Second, argument still rages...

We (a) propose an implementable innovation index, (b) relate it to existing innovation definitions and (c) show whole-economy and industry-specific results for the UK market sector, 2000-2005. Our innovation measure starts by observing that we could get more GDP without innovation by simply...

This paper uses data on very small UK geographies to investigate the effective size of local labor markets. Our approach treats geographic space as continuous, as opposed to a collection of non-overlapping administrative units, thus avoiding problems of mismeasurement of local labor markets...

It has been widely argued that inflation persistence since WWII has been widespread and durable and that it can only be accounted for by models with a high degree of nominal rigidity. We examine UK post-war data where after confirming previous studies findings of varying persistence due to...

A Real Business Cycle model of the UK is developed to account for the behaviour of UK nonstationary macro data. The model is tested by the method of indirect inference, bootstrapping the errors to generate 95% confidence limits for a VECM representation of the data; we find the model can explain...

We investigate whether the Fiscal Theory of the Price Level can explain UK inflation in the 1970s. We find that fiscal policy was non-Ricardian and money growth entirely endogenous in this period. The implied model of inflation is tested in two ways: for its trend using cointegration analysis...

We extend the method of indirect inference testing to data that is not filtered and so may be non-stationary. We apply the method to an open economy real business cycle model on UK data. We review the method using a Monte Carlo experiment and find that it performs accurately and has good power.

We examine the relationships between productivity growth, IT investment and organisational change (∆O) using UK firm data. Consistent with the small number of other micro studies we find (a) IT appears to have high returns in a growth accounting sense when ∆O is omitted; when ∆O is included...