The paper considers price trends as signals for the evaluation of reforms leading to ownership or market structure changes in public services. In order to do so, we focus on a specific example: electricity prices in four countries, namely UK, France, Germany and Italy. We consider that these...

The privatisation policy pursued in the UK by Mrs Thatcher's government (1979-1990) and subsequently by Mr Major's government (1990-1997) was the largest experiment in public divestitures among capitalist economies. It had a deep impact on economic policy-making world wide, and was vastly...

This study examines the determinants of voluntary donations to UK charities, using empirical specifications that combine error-component and simultaneous-equations methods. In a series of tests, we identify the fixed-effects endogenous representations as the best empirical models. When...

This paper examines the changes in strategy and structure of the largest 250 non-financial firms in both Britain and Germany in the late 1990s. To this end, the results of a questionnaire survey are presented which were sent to the chief executives of those companies. What came through from the...

If a company's auditor believes that the company is likely to enter bankruptcy, the auditor is required to warn investors by giving a 'equalified' audit report. This paper investigates whether managers use auditor switching to prevent auditors from giving qualified reports ('opinion-shopping')....

This paper analyses whether scale economies exists in the UK telecommunications industry. The approach employed differs from other UK studies in that panel data for a range of companies is used. This increases the number of observations and thus allows potentially for more robust tests for...

This paper presents the results of a survey of newspaper reports published between 1995 and 2002 of incidents involving allegations of criminal and civil wrongdoing by officers and directors of charitable organizations. Of the one hundred and fifty-two incidents found, one hundred and four...

This paper investigates the determinants of labour turnover using establishment-level survey data for the UK. The main contribution of our paper is that it estimates the impact of wages, unionization, training and other aspects of working conditions on labour turnover. Our main findings are: (i)...