The national debt stock of the UK is rising sharply as a result of the economic crisis, and equilibrium output is falling, with the capital stock contracting. Both problems could be alleviated by the rapid introduction (but slow implementation) of a policy to extend working lives. The paper...

Augmenting a Mincerian earnings function with industry level data we estimate the external return to schooling for a repeated cross-section of individuals in the UK over the period 1994-2004. We find that a one year increase in the industry average level of schooling is associated with an...

Recent time series evidence favouring a supply-side interpretation of long-run unemployment in the UK is based on the finding of cointegration between unemployment and wage pressure variables. We show that this is necessary but not sufficient. The key assumptions in recent work, that a single...

This paper describes the National Institute of Economic and Social Research’s (NIESR)approach to the analysis of the implementation of the Lisbon Agenda. It forms the background to the European Commission Competitiveness Report chapter on spillovers and the Lisbon Process. The paper describes...

The paper discusses the possibility of a systemic banking crisis as a result of debt defaults, putting this risk and its impact on the economy into recent historical context. It looks at the vulnerability of the personal and business sectors to increases in borrowing rates, and at the evidence...

Presentation to the Low Pay Commission

In this paper we construct a framework for evaluating the macroeconomic impact on the UK economy of policies that are aimed at reducing the number of people receiving social security benefits and getting them into employment. By means of model simulations we find that a 5 per cent reduction in...