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...

Informal job search methods could alleviate short-term labour market difficulties of displaced workers by providing information on job opportu- nities, allowing them to signal their productivity and may mitigate wage losses through better post-displacement job matching. However if dis- placement...

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...

Nonlinear models of deviations from PPP have recently provided an important, theoretically well motivated, contribution to the PPP puzzle. Most of these studies use temporally aggregated data to empirically estimate the nonlinear models. As noted by Taylor (2001), if the true DGP is nonlinear,...

Similar to most top-tier matches in professional basketball, baseball and soccer, high-level competitions in individualistic sports, such as the tennis tournaments of Wimble-don and Flushing Meadows, the golf tournaments of Augusta and St. Andrews, as well as the marathons of New York and London...

This paper investigates the extent to which exam performance at the end of compulsory education has been affected by three major education reforms: the introduction of a quasi-market following the Education Reform Act (1988); the specialist schools initiative introduced in 1994; and the Excellence...

The paper examines the impact of regulatory intervention on store card interest rates, for a panel of UK store cards. The analysis is timely given the public attention that high store card interest rates have attracted in the UK, and the enquiries by the Office of Fair Trading and the...

Although a considerable literature exists on the determinants of managerial compensation, much of it focussing on the role of incentives, there is much less known about the impact of managerial remuneration and quality upon attainment of organizational goals. In this paper we apply two distinct...

In the field of personnel economics, there are few opportunities to convincingly test for salary returns to specialization as against versatility or multi-tasking. This paper performs such a test by modeling returns to performance measures associated with two different skills practiced by...

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...