Immigration to the UK has risen in the past 10 years and has had a measurable effect on the supply of different types of labour. But, existing studies of the impact of immigration on the wages of native-born workers in the UK (e.g. Dustmann, Fabbri and Preston, 2005) have failed to find any...

Emerging-market countries are being urged to choose between freely floating exchange rates and firmly fixed rates supported by strong institutional arrangementsûcurrency boards, monetary unions, or formal dollarization. This paper assesses the benefits and costs of institutionalizing fixed...

This paper argues that one cannot tell a convincing story of the rise in OECD unemployment without mentioning the slowdown in productivity and real wage growth that occurred in the 1970s. It is argued that whereas most authors have regarded any effects of the slowdown on unemployment as...

A competitive business cycle model is developed in which internal increasing returns translate a white noise random shock into temporarily agglomerated economic activity. Te qualitative nature of the economy varies over the cycle due to changes in the underlying economic structure, giving rise...

This paper investigates the relationship between consumer demand and firms' mark-up for several products in the UK, using two independent datasets. It uses data on consumer expenditures and the retail price index to estimate Almost Ideal Demand Systems on micro-data and compute time-varying...

We examine the relationships between productivity growth, IT investment and organisational change (∆O) using UK firm data. Consistent with the small number of other micro studies we find (a) IT appears to have high returns in a growth accounting sense when ∆O is omitted; when ∆O is included...

This paper documents the delayed adoption of a major technological innovation: the adoption of the diesel locomotive in the US railway industry. Contrary to other instances of major technological innovations, the delay in the adoption of the diesel locomotive was not associated with an initial...

The paper examines Hungary's experience with banking and bankruptcy reform in the period 1992-94. The first part of the paper uses enterprise-level data to show that in 1992, the same year in which the amount of classified loans in the state-owned commercial banks grew enormously, the proportion...

Spanish trade unions enjoy an uncomfortable mix of high coverage and very low membership base. This state of affairs has arisen primarily because of state support for the collective representation system. Union organisation in terms of the core and its branches and system. Union organisation in...

This article develops a framework for efficient IV estimators of random effects models with information in levels which can accommodate predetermined variables. Our formulation clarifies the relationship between the existing estimators and the role of transformation in panel data models. We...