Between 1993 and April 1999 there was no minimum wage in the United Kingdom (except in agriculture). In this paper we study the effects of the introduction of a National Minimum Wage (NMW) in April 1999 on one heavily affected sector, the residential care homes industry. This sector contains a...

Peoples who at some stage in their history migrated from an original homeland and settled in a European country – that is, diasporic groups – is estimated to be between ten and 30 million across a total population in the European Union (EU) of about 380 million. In addition to that millions...

Much of the academic and policy literature on performance related pay focuses on its role as an incentive system. Its role as means for renegotiating performance norms has been largely neglected. The introduction of performance related pay, based mostly on appraisals by line managers, in the...

We develop a structural model of an industry with many entrepreneurial firms in order to investigate the cyclical behaviour of aggregate fixed investment, variable capital investment and output. In particular, we consider an environment in which the entrepreneur cannot borrow unless the debt is...

This paper contains evidence submitted on the DTI green paper ''High Performance Workplaces: The Role of Employee Involvement in a Modern Economy: A Discussion Paper''. This follows on the EU Directive establishing a General Framework for Informing and Consulting Employees. The comments proceed...

The reinsurance market is the secondary market for insurance risks. It has a very specific organization. Direct insurers do not trade risks with each other. They cede part of their primarily underwritten portfolios mainly to professional reinsurers with no direct business. This paper offers a...

Liquidity, defined as the ease with which an asset may be marketed, has a self-fulfilling dimension. If investors in the primary market for a new asset fear an illiquid secondary market, the issuance does not take off, thereby vindicating the initial concern about an illiquid secondary market....

This paper investigates the estimation of long-term VaR. It also suggests a simple approach to the estimation of long-term VaR that avoids problems associated with the square-root rule for extrapolating VaR, as well as those associated with attempts to extrapolate day-to-day volatility forecasts...

We propose a boundedly rational model of opinion formation in which individuals are subject to persuasion bias; that is, they fail to account for possible repetition in the information they receive. We show that persuasion bias implies the phenomenon of social influence, whereby one’s...