This paper examines the extent to which the policies towards thewelfare state pursued by the Labour Government in its first fifteenmonths represent a break with those of its Conservativepredecessor and with earlier policies put forward by Labour inopposition. Four key parts of its inheritance...

The principal aim of Section F of the British Association is to show how economicanalysis can be applied to illuminate important issues of public concern. The themefor the 1997 Section F Meeting of “Equality and Opportunity” surely satisfied thiscriterion. The subject matter is highly...

Martin Evans has examined the organisation, targeting and implementation ofwelfare to work programmes in five countries: the UK, France, Germany,Netherlands and the USA. His study focussed on the different definitions of targetpopulations for welfare to work abroad and how their programmes were...

As unemployment falls it is often the most disadvantaged unemployed whoget left behind. To identify what works to improve the job prospects of thisgroup, Helen Evans has looked at Bootstrap Enterprises in Hackney, anexample of a community-based employment project working for 22 years withthis...

[...]Our research on seven ‘weak marketcities’ in five European countriessupported by the Joseph RowntreeFoundation was completed and theresulting book, Phoenix Cities by AnnePower, Jörg Plöger and Astrid Winkler,will be published in March 2010.However, we were delighted that...

Welfare to work policy is central to British reforms of itswelfare state and social security system. We are not alonein our desire to assist unemployed and other claimants tofind and retain work. It is therefore important to be able tolook to other countries and consider lessons that could...

This paper uses confidential microdata from the Census of Services to examine lawfirms' field boundaries. We find that the share of lawyers working in field-specializedfirms increases as market size increases and lawyers field-specialize, indicating thattransaction costs among lawyers, and not...

A large theoretical literature focuses on the question: What determines firms’ boundaries?Recently, Garicano and Santos and Holmstrom and Milgrom have proposed theories in whichfirms’ boundaries reflect the division of labor across individuals. This paper discussesstrategies for generating...

The car sequencing problem is a widespread short-term decision problem, in whichsequences of different car models launched down a mixed-model assembly line are tobe determined. To avoid work overloads of workforce, car sequencing restricts themaximum occurrence of labor-intensive options, e.g.,...

One of the key goals of political economy is to understand how in-stitutional arrangements shape policy outcomes. This paper studiesa comparatively neglected aspect of this - the forces that shape het-erogeneous performance of autocracies. The paper develops a simpletheoretical model of...