The paper examines the changing regional specialization of U.K. employment over the period 1971-94, analyzing the extent to which U.K. regional policy has altered the industrial structure of the Assisted Area regions, making them less vulnerable to economic change. All regional economies are...

<title>Abstract</title> The use of information intermediaries has been shown to undermine the effect of brand in online markets. In this paper, the effect of consumer search on the relationship between brand advertising and pricing strategies is analysed. Price data are taken from the leading UK motor...

This paper's purpose is to review the recent experience of foreign direct investment (FDI) in North East England, and to explore the implications of this for the region's prospective economic development. Foreign-owned plants are reckoned to account for more than half the North East's employment...

The provision of financial assistance to industry has formed a growing and important part of the economic development policies of many local authorities. However, assessments of these policies have suffered from a number of drawbacks. In particular, they have tended to focus on the employment...

The paper argues that in order to use macro-evaluation techniques to calculate the employment effect of a policy over some sub-period after policy commencement, it is necessary to determine the rate at which policy jobs are lost. Crucially, it is the rate at which jobs cease to be attributable...

The paper utilizes data for north-east England over the period 1985-98 to examine if foreign-owned start-up plants achieve their job targets. Different models are estimated, each shedding light on the relationship between the jobs promised by plants in their initial investment and their actual...

Foreign-owned plants have higher conditional exit rates, and this paper tests the hypothesis that re-investment "embeds" these plants, leading to significantly longer survival time durations. A unique dataset is used for 265 plants that commenced in foreign ownership after 1985 in North East...

This paper analyzes the observed phenomenon of public for private fund substitution in industrial assistance by examing the public and private sector funding of investment under different assumptions about the nature of the private capital market. This bears on the effectiveness of industrial...