Research to date suggests that the UK National Minimum Wage (NMW) has raised the earnings of low paid workers, without significantly affecting their employment opportunities. We re-examine existing evidence and suggest the picture is less clear cut. We explore whether the impacts of the NMW...

This report is about the employment impacts of National Minimum Wage (NMW) rises in the period 2001-2006. This was a period where the NMW rose substantially in excess of average earnings. The report presents results based on analysis of individual Labour Force Survey (LFS) data and Annual Survey...

Palm oil production potentially affects environment, food security and rural development in Indonesia. However, there is little research on the welfare impacts of the production expansion. By using district level data on palm oil production and area planted and national household survey...

The transition from autocracy to democracy may lead a country to break-up. The break-ups of the USSR and Yugoslavia led to sharp falls in emissions. If something similar would happen in China, projected emissions would fall by 50% or more. Break-up uncertainty dominates other scenario uncertainty.

We develop a climate-economy model with active learning. We consider three ways of active learning: improved observations, adding observations from the past and improved theory from climate research. From the model, we find that the decision maker invests a significant amount of money in climate...

We generalize Wirl’s (JEEM, 2009) “oligopoly meets oligopsony” model of a permit market for the case of heterogeneous players. Both oligopolists and oligopsonists reduce welfare by restricting trade. Having both in the market reinforces this. However, oligopolists seek to increase the...

This paper applies the Ijiri-Simon test for systematic deviations from Gibrat’s Law to citation numbers of economists. It is found that often-cited researchers attract a new citation numbers that are disproportionate to the quality of their work. It is also found that this Matthew Effect is...

Agriculture employs 60% of workers in rural Indonesia whose crop production and incomes are threatened by variation in climatic conditions. Delayed monsoon onset related to El Niño is likely to become more frequent with climate change. Using the Indonesian Family Life Survey, IFLS, this paper...

Most functions of economic impact assume that climate change is smooth. We here propose impact functions that have stochastic climate change as an input. These functions are identical in shape and have similar parameters as do deterministic impact functions. The mean stochastic impacts are thus...

I estimate the cost of meeting the EU 2030 targets for greenhouse gas emission reduction, using statistical emulators of ten alternative models. Assuming a first-best policy implementation, I find that total and marginal costs are modest. The statistical emulators allow me to compute the risk...