Using information collected by the National Audit Office, a comparison of several aspects of performance on recent Private Finance Initiative (PFI) contracts is conducted. The first aspect is a sector by sector comparison of refinancing profits, bearing in mind differential risk levels and in...

This paper offers a comprehensive evaluation of the welfare impact of a policy usually regarded as highly successful and vastly imitated worldwide: The privatisation policy pursued in the UK by Mrs Thatcher's government (1979-1990) and subsequently by Mr Major's government (1990-1997) The...

This study explores the impact of a particular low marginal-cost employee benefit on employees' intended retention and performance. By utilizing a unique data set constructed by surveying full-time faculty and staff members at a public university in the United States, we study the impact of this...

This paper considers how the demand for non-material aspects of jobs evolves over changing wealth levels and how firms may want to react. We first consider the importance of non-material job aspects in general before turning to two specific human resource practices: flexible working hour...

In recent years, many employees have gained more control over temporal and locational aspects of their work via a variety of flexible work arrangements, such as flexi-time and telehomework. This temporal and locational flexibility of work (TLF) is often seen as a means to facilitate the...

This paper is about public sector pensions, an issue that has become increasingly contentious in a number of countries in recent years, including in the United Kingdom. In the UK the public debate has focussed on the perceived generosity of these pensions, which, it is often claimed, contrasts...

We exploit lottery wins to investigate the effects of exogenous changes to individuals' income on health care demand in the United Kingdom. This strategy allows us to estimate lottery income elasticities for a range of health care services that are publicly and privately provided. The results...

The Mirrlees Review recommends that commodity taxation should in general be uniform, but with some goods consumed in conjunction with labour supply (such as child care) left untaxed. This paper examines the validity of this claim in an optimal income tax framework. Contrary to the recommendation...

Pricing of roads has been a mantra in transportation economics for many decades now. The basic economic reasoning is sound: optimal consumption of a road is set where price=marginal cost (P=MC) and the lack of a price or the presence of underpricing will lead to economically inefficient levels...

We study the effects of public evaluation of university research on the pay structures of academic departments. A simple model of university pay determination shows how the pay-performance relationship can be explained by the incentives inherent in the research evaluation process. We then...