In recent years, Poland witnessed a dramatic decline in its unemployment rate and, from having had one of the worst jobless records in the EU-27, the country now posts a figure below the Union average. However, this remarkable turnaround has apparently been driven by amendments to the country's...

Many countries provide transfers for particular client groups such as children and often such transfers are in-kind rather than cash. However, this may, at least partially, crowd out private expenditures on the goods in question because they reduce the incentive for other individuals, like...

In this study, the degree of convergence of inflation rates of Central and East European economies to a variety of measures of European norm inflation is assessed using a range of techniques. These include unit root testing based upon panels of data and - an innovation to the pertinent...

In this paper we calculate the technical efficiencies, based upon multiple outputs - school exam performance and attendance rates - of all secondary schools in England over the period 1993-97. We then estimate models to examine the determinants of efficiency in a particular year, and the...

Recent research by Gu and Wu (2003) and Basu and Markov (2004) suggests that the well-known optimism bias in analysts' earnings forecasts is attributable to analysts minimizing symmetric, linear loss functions when the distribution of forecast errors is skewed. An alternative explanation for...

Individual risk aversion and riskiness of investment in higher education are combined with two alternative loan-based financing systems, income contingent loans (ICL) and mortgage loans (ML), to investigate the effects on graduate lifetime expected utilities. We deal explicitly with the presence...

This paper models the impacts of market size and team competition for fan base on matchday attendance in the English Premier League over the period 1997-2004 using a large panel data set. We construct a comprehensive set of control variables and use tobit estimation to overcome the problems...

The paper tests, in the context of an open sports league, whether greater success is achieved by clubs in markets with larger populations. The relationship is strong but, to a limited extent, mitigated by more clubs establishing in large markets.

This paper provides estimates of the impact of higher education qualifications on the earnings of graduates in the UK by subject studied. We use data from the recent UK Labour Force Surveys which provide a sufficiently large sample to consider the effects of the subject studied, class of first...

This paper challenges the view held by the UK Government that the introduction of the English Baccalaureate will lead to an improvement in educational outcomes in secondary education. Evidence is presented to show that this new qualification is biased against disadvantaged pupils from low-income...