The Restart programme and the Enterprise Allowance Scheme were introduced in the eighties to combat the high levels and the persistence of unemployment. This paper uses aggregate time series to investigate whether these measures have been important determinants of the overall and...

This paper investigates the economic impact of the government's proposed new UK R&D tax credit. We measure the benefit of the credit by the effect on value added in the short and long?run. This is simulated from existing econometric estimates of the tax?price elasticity of R&D and the effect of...

This paper examines the implications of treating seasonality as an unobserved component which changes slowly over time. This approach simplifies the specification of dynamic relationships by separating non-seasonal from seasonal factors. We illustrate this approach using the consumption model of...

The impact of a number of variables upon the aggregate time series in the UK of the self-employed to employed and self-employed to unemployed is studied. The period covered is from 1950-90. Separate models are compared for men and women. The findings suggest that self-employment may be...

This paper argues that trainging often has a wider role than just the acquisition of technical skills and that company training ought to be analysed as part of a broader labour management strategy for companies. Evidence is adduced for this, drawing on both ecnomic and management literatures,...

When firms cluster in the same local labor market, they face a trade-off between the benefits of labor pooling (i.e., access to workers whose knowledge help reduce costs) and the costs of labor poaching (i.e., loss of some key workers to competition and the indirect effect of a higher wage bill...

In the conventional perfectly competitive model of the labour market, wage-setting is individualistic in the sense that identical workers should receive identical wages in different firms and different workers should receive different wages in the same firm. But, in reality, wages often seem to...

This paper analyzes differences in R&D spending and in the impact of R&D on productivity between German and UK firms. We confirm that German firms spend significantly larger amounts on R&D than their UK counterparts, even after controlling for firm size and industry effects. Using a dynamic...

This paper evaluates evidence from information provided by trade unions and employers' association in 1990-91 on the influence of the law on industrial disputes in the 1980s. A detailed analysis of four sectors - education, other public services, printing and publishing, engineering and...

To study the detailed location patterns of industries, and particularly the tendency for industries to cluster relative to overall manufacturing, we develop distance-based tests of localisation. In contrast to previous studies, our approach allows us to assess the statistical significance of...