We examine productivity growth since World War II in the five leading research economies: West Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Japan, and the United States. Available data on the capital-output ratio suggest that these countries grew as they did because of their ability to adopt more...

We study the effects of bicycle safety regulations in both the United States and the United Kingdom on bicycle accident rates for various population age groups. We find small, statistically significant decreases in the accident rates as the stock of bicycles increases its compliance with the...

Although large changes in real exchange rates have occurred during the past decades, the real implications of these movements remain an empirical question. Using detailed data from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Japan we examine the implications of exchange rates for time...

This paper examines annual commodity price data from England and Holland over a span of seven centuries. Our data set incorporates transactions prices on 8 commodities: barley, butter, cheese, eggs, oats, peas, silver, wheat as well as pound/shilling nominal exchange rates going back, in some...

In this paper we develop and test two hypotheses about purchasing power parity (PPP) derived from the pricing behavior of profit- maximizing, exporting firms. The first is that changes in the price of traded goods relative to domestic substitutes, due to partial pass- through of exchange rates,...

We study the determinants of the dollar/pound real exchange rate from 1879 to 1914 focusing on the role of fiscal policy. We present a simple dynamic model of the real exchange rate to frame our analysis. The econometric results are based upon the decomposition of the sources of the innovation...

Following Phillip's original work on the UK, applied research on unemployment and wages has been dominated by the analysis of highly aggregated time-series data sets. However, it has proved difficult with such methods to uncover statistically reliable models. This paper adopts a different...

Recent work on the economic effects of minimum wages has stressed that the standard economic model, where increases in minimum wages depress employment, is not supported by the empirical findings in some labour markets. In this paper we present a theoretical framework which is general enough to...

The authors analyze establishment-level data from the three Workplace Industrial Relations Surveys of 1980, 1984 and 1990 to document and explain the sharp decline in unionization that occurred in Britain over the 1980s. Between 1980 and 1990 the proportion of British establishments which...

The relationship between unions and earnings dispersion is examined using establishment-level data from the 1980, 1984 and 1990 Workplace Industrial Relations Surveys. Initially the cross-sectional relationship is examined using the 1990 data. The earnings dispersion of skilled and semi-skilled...