This paper presents new evidence on the size and direction of governments' R&D funding response to the COVID-19 pandemic through the exploration of a novel data infrastructure, the OECD Fundstat initiative for the analysis of government-funded R&D projects. The document reports on the...

The use of tax incentives that provide preferential tax treatment to the incomes arising from research and development (R&D) and innovation activities, such as intellectual property regimes, has accelerated over the last two decades. The globalisation of R&D together with the greater mobility of...

We construct firm-level data set with matched productivity and qualification data by linking the Annual Business Inquiry and Employer Skills Survey for England. We first examine the effect of workplace skills and other characteristics such as part-time status and gender on both productivity and...

This paper provides up-to-date empirical evidence on the socio-economic gap in higher education (HE) participation, for the period spanning the introduction of tuition fees. We assess whether the gap has widened and ask whether the socio-economic gap emerges on entry into university or much...

This paper contributes to the understanding of how compulsory schooling regulations affect educational attainment and subsequent labour market outcomes. It uses valuable information from a natural experiment driven by rules that allow for variation in legal dropout dates. Since the school...

In a meritocratic society an individual's economic success is determined by their ability, not by their parents' socio-economic status. We assess whether meritocracy has increased in both the British education system and labour market. The richness of our longitudinal data enables us to look at...

This paper presents a new model of endogenous wage and capital dispersion where heterogeneity is driven by entrepreneurial incentives to pay higher wages in order to attract and retain workers. The main contribution of this model is to provide a framework with microeconomic foundations that give...

Most countries seek to reduce inequality by encouraging educational attainment, particularly by striving for better outcomes for able individuals from poor backgrounds. We analyse whether this has been a feature of Britain’s substantial expansion of education during the past several decades....