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...

We investigate how team and individual performances of players in the National Basketball Association respond to variations in intra-team pay inequality. By breaking down team dispersion into conditional and expected components, we find that expected pay dispersion has a positive effect on team...

This empirical paper investigates skill formation in the youth labour market. Using event-history data collected from the administrative records of Lancashire Careers Service, we model skill preferences formed at school by young people and skill destination, ie the occupation of the first...

This paper proposes a theory of socially optimal districting in a legislative-election model with endogenous party platforms. We generalize the model of Coate and Knight (2007), allowing parties to strategically condition their platforms on the districting. The socially optimal districting re...

This paper examines the dynamics of the linkages between Shang- hai and Hong Kong stock indices. While the volatility linkage is anal- ysed by a multivariate GARCH framework, the linkage of returns is examined using a copula approach. Eight different copula functions are applied in this study...

Unemployment continues to bedevil Poland, albeit with striking sub-national differences, which this paper seeks to explain using random effects error component two-stage estimation for the country's NUTS 4 level powiats. Given the economy's peculiar configuration under communism, with its large...

There has been concern that the increase in non-standard or flexible employment contracts witnessed in many OECD economies is evidence of a growth in low-pay, low-quality jobs. In practice, however, it is difficult to evaluate the `quality' of flexible jobs. Previous research has either...

We investigate the procedure used by Ané and Geman (2000) to recover the moments of the information flow from high frequency data, in a model which generalizes the subordinated process in Clark (1973). We explain why the third and higher moments of the latent information flow cannot be...

This paper explores the concept of cooperative merger between two of three entrants that arrive sequentially in a spatial market and practise discriminatory pricing. In this framework, in contrast to much of the theoretical literature, the so-called 'merger paradox' can be comprehensively...