Despite the apparent importance of the "knowledge economy," U.K. macroeconomic performance appears unaffected: investment rates are flat, and productivity has slowed. We investigate whether measurement issues might account for this puzzle. The standard National Accounts treatment of most...

Many papers have documented wide variations in productivity even in narrowly defined industries. Some have argued that this primarily reflects measurement problems due, for example, to comparing across different products. Others argue that this reflects persistent differences in performance due,...

Many productivity studies, if they cover the service sector, commonly enter a caveat that the data are uncertain or just look at manufacturing. This paper attempts to clarify what UK market-service-sector data are available, whether they should be treated as inaccurate, and what conceptual...

It is widely felt that skill shortages are a serious problem in the United Kingdom. This paper investigates the causes of skill shortages. The authors' empirical work is based on job matching theory so that shortages correspond to long duration vacancies. They argue that shortages depend on...

Following D. Kreps and J. Scheinkman (1983), it is common to view the difference between Cournot and Bertrand competition as depending on production capacity. Bertrand undercutting is only feasible if firms have capacity to serve the market gained. If firms are capacity constrained, the Cournot...

This paper examines how firms interact with their rivals. The main novelty of the authors' approach is that they let conjectural variations depend on the actual ability of other firms to react, which they measure by both the physical capacity and financial status of firms. The authors' main...

The authors review recent international price comparisons to examine the veracity of claims about “rip-off Britainâ€. They reach three conclusions. First, methodologically, the data requirements for a meaningful price comparison are very demanding and most of the evidence does not meet...

We analyse productivity growth in UK manufacturing 1980-92 using the newly available ARD panel of establishments drawn from the Census of Production. We examine the contribution to productivity growth of 'internal' restructuring (such as new technology and organisational change among survivors)...