Why has globalisation brought such large increases in exports to some countries and not to others? Stephen Redding and Anthony Venables look at the way internal geography and domestic institutions seem to be a large part of the answer.

What is the relationship between the structure of earnings within firms and their business and employment performance? A major CEP project led by David Marsden has been using new European data to examine the role that firms' performance management systems play in the macroeconomy. In particular,...

The market is a place where people behave quite relentlessly. If one person is selling a particular commodity at a higher price than others, no one will buy that commodity from him, however virtuous or merciful he is known to be. Of course, the actual world does not always work exactly in this...

One of the most striking changes in labor market policy of the past fifty years has come in the form of legislation to limit discrimination in the workplace based on race, gender, disability and age. If such measures are to be effective in ending discrimination, they need to be enforced. The...

The introduction of performance-related pay in England's schools has had a generally bad press. But David Marsden and Richard Belfield find that it is starting to have a positive impact both on school management and pupils' academic achievements.

This article unveils the different ‘thought worlds’ that inform urban development policy and the reality of urban service delivery in Faisalabad, Pakistan’s third largest city. Focusing on changing patterns of residential waste removal and based on ethnographic work among minority...

This paper presents a model of competition between operators on urban local bus routes in which passengers always board the first bus to arrive, and it is costly to revise timetables. The model predicts that timetables are unstable, the operator whose bus was boarded by fewest passengers is the...

What economic mechanisms underlie the polarisation of the world economy into the ‘high wage’ industrialised countries, and the less developed ‘low wage’ countries? Should we expect the two groups to converge over time, or to diverge? What economic mechanisms come into play as LDCs...