We apply a new estimator to the measurement of the economic returns to education. We control for endogenous education, unobserved ability and measurement error using only the natural heteroscedasticty of wages and education attainment. Our prefered estimate, 6.07%, is closer to the OLS estimate...

In this paper we challenge the traditional labour market view, which argues that unemployment is determined in the long-term by its equilibrium rate, which in turn is affected by permanent shocks of some exogenous variables. In our empirical approach we decompose the dynamics of employment and...

The aim of this paper is to analyze and estimate salient characteristics of unemployment dynamics. Movements in unemployment are viewed as "chain reactions" of responses to labour market shocks, working their way through systems of interacting lagged adjustment processes. In the context of...

Motivated by economic-theory concepts - the Fisher hypothesis and the theory of the term structure - we consider a small set of simple bivariate closed-loop time-series models for the prediction of price inflation and of long- and short-term interest rates. The set includes vector...

This paper investigates the impact of revisions in inflation expectations on the prices of UK inflation-indexed and conventional government bonds with a vector autoregressive (VAR) model. Downwards revisions of inflation expectations are associated with unexpected increases in the prices of...

We investigate the use of various job search strategies and their impact on the probability of subsequent employment and the re-employment wage among working age men in Britain. We find that replying to advertisements and using Job Centres are the two most common methods of job search and that...

This paper examines the pass-through from the market interest to the rate charged on bank loans using aggregate data for the U.K. Thereby, we explicitly disentangle credit supply and demand and allow the interest rate charged on loans to depend on the volume of loans. We find that, although...

A firm's decision to employ agency workers may be perceived as a replace- ment of directly employed workers or as way to curb union power, which trade unions would oppose. Alternatively, trade unions may encourage the (tem- porary) employment of agency workers in a firm, if they manage to...

The expansion of Western European production accelerated in the first half of 1997. Exports were the main engine, driven by a devaluation of European currencies and strong growth abroad. Domestic demand also picked up somewhat led by investment in machinery and equipment. Inflation remained at...

Over the course of the past twenty years, venture capital has fuelled an entrepreneurial revolution - first in the United States and now in Europe's common market -, which has opened new opportunities for technological innovation, capital investment and employment growth. Some of the most...