Despite the economic downturn the issue of skills has remained at the top of the political agenda – highlighting its importance to the prosperity of the nation. We at the CII are committed to promoting the development of skills to ensure a more professional and competitive workforce. UKplc is...

The existing literature on training is concerned with understanding the reasons whyfirms pay for the general skills of their workers, but without explaining which firmstrain which workers. This paper develops a theory that both explains the willingnessof firms to pay for general training, and...

The core question addressed in this paper is: What happens tofacts after their construction? The main contribution is to analysethe different practices of disseminating, circulating and crossfertilizingmodel-produced facts about Haemophilus influenzaetype b and Streptococcus pneumoniae bacterial...

The role of technology in the transition from premodern to modern economies in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe is among the major questions in economic history, but it is still poorly understood. A plausible explanation of premodern European technological development must account...

In this article we attempt to provide some reorientation for theuse of the concept of knowledge within management studies. The point ofdeparture is the striking discrepancy between the great importance nowadaysattributed to knowledge (knowledge economy, knowledge resources,knowledge societies,...

This paper studies how portable skill accumulated in the labor market are. Using rich data ontasks performed in occupations, we propose the concept of task-specific human capital tomeasure the transferability of skills empirically. Our results on occupational mobility andwages show that labor...

In labor markets with worker and firm heterogeneity, the matching between firms and workersmay be assortative, meaning that the most productive workers and firms team up. Weinvestigate this with longitudinal population-wide matched employer-employee data fromPortugal...

This paper identifies several distortions which create barriers to entrepreneurship. First, inaddition to the innate entry cost, there are entry costs caused by regulation. Second, unionwage policies raise the opportunity cost of entrepreneurship...<BR>