There is a growing body of research that measures employment effects of the minimum wage by using longitudinal data on individuals to compare job loss of workers affected by a minimum wage increase with those who are not directly affected. This sort of study requires good quality wage data in...

When central banks are transparent about their decision making, there may be clear benefits in terms ofcredibility, policy effectiveness, and improved democratic accountability. While recent literature has focusedon all of these advantages of transparency, in this paper we consider one potential...

Relative poverty in the UK has risen massively since 1979 mainly because of increasing worklessness, rising earnings dispersion and benefits indexed to prices, not wages. So poverty is now at a very high level. The economic forces underlying this are the significant shift in demand against the...

Strategic patenting is widely believed to raise the costs of innovating, especially in industries characterised by cumulative innovation. This paper studies the effects of strategic patenting on R&D, patenting and market value in the computer software industry. We focus on two key aspects:...

The striking geographical concentration of economic activities suggests that there are substantial benefits toagglomeration. However, the nature of those benefits remains unclear. In this paper we take advantage of a newdataset to quantify the role of one of the main contenders - the matching of...

This paper studies the role of intrinsic motivation, reputation, and reciprocity in driving open source software innovation. Unlike previous literature based on survey data, we exploit the observed pattern of contributions - the .revealed preference. of developers - to infer the underlying...

Informal contacts are extensively used by both firms and workers to find jobs and fill vacancies. Thecommon wisdom in the economic literature is that jobs created through this channel are of better qualityand pay higher wages than jobs created through formal methods. This paper explores the...

The impact of R&D on growth through spillovers has been a major topic of economic research over the last thirty years. A central problem in the literature is that firm performance is affected by two countervailing "spillovers": a positive effect from technology (knowledge) spillovers and...

Most estimates of the cost of crime focus on victims. Yet it is plausible that an even larger cost of crime occurs via its indirect impact on the mental wellbeing of non-victims. To test how crime affects individuals' mental outcomes, we exploit detailed panel data on mental wellbeing, allowing...

With the NHS a central issue of the 2015 general election, the parties are debating funding, the form of provision, quality and productivity. This paper looks at the NHS record under the coalition government and considers the plans each major party have put forward regarding the future of the...