Persistent productivity gains to rural-urban migrants have been documented by a number ofresearchers. One interpretation of this result is that individuals learn higher value skills incities than they would have learned in less dense areas. Another explanation for this result,however, is that...

Using decomposition analysis, the paper investigates the reasons why Northern England has less but higher perfoming self-employed business than the South. It finds the causes are mainly structural differences rather than due to regional variation in people's characteristics..

Using nationally representative, longitudinal data from the first 14 waves of the BritishHousehold Panel Survey we examine the labour market returns to inter-regional migration inGreat Britain...

The Welsh economy has undergone rapid structural change in recent years.This paper uses data from the New Earnings Survey to examine how earnings in Waleschanged relative to those of Great Britain between 1975 and 1994. There are five mainfindings. First, earnings of workers in Wales have...

This paper provides a critical overview and a detailed research agenda for scholarsinterested in regional studies with a special focus on old and new European Union memberstates. The focus is on the microeconomic foundations of structural change and its spatiallyasymmetric impact on labour...

Many countries around the world have large public pension programs. Traditionally, these programshave been used to induce retirement by the elderly in order to free up jobs for the young andto redistribute income across generations. This paper provides an efficiency rationale for the...

It is puzzling that people feel quite unhappy when they become unemployed, while at thesame time active labor market policies are needed to bring unemployed back to work morequickly. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we investigate whether there isindeed such a puzzle. First, we...