Although popular in some circles, efficiency wage models of the labour market have proved surprisingly difficult to test and direct evidence for the central tenets of the theory is rare to non-existent. In this paper we propose a simple test of the Shapiro-Stiglitz shirking model which is based...

How much changed regarding the wage employment relationship in Britain between 1979 and 1994, as the government tried to encourage greater wage and employment flexibility? This paper uses settlement group wage contact data to track the evolution of nominal wage settlements over time and examines...

I model and simulate the effects of employment tax cuts on unemployment and wages in four equilibrium models: competitive, union bargaining, search and efficiency wages. I find that if the ratio of unemployment compensation to wages is fixed, the effect of the tax cut is mainly on wages. But if...

This paper analyses the theoretical arguments and empirical evidence linking enterprise performance in transition economies to the macroeconomic environment. Macroeconomic instability is traced to the unsustainability of the fiscal-financial and monetary programmes of the state and to regulatory...

One seemingly incontestable fact about British industrial relations over the last quarter century is the decentralisation of private sector collective bargaining from multi-employer level to the level of the enterprise, division, or plant. This article explores what is often seen to be a deviant...

In this paper we consider the case for subsidies towards firms which generate R&D spillovers in open economies. We show that many expected results are overturned in the presence of strategic behaviour by firms. Local R&D spillovers to other domestic firms may justify an R&D tax rather than a...

This paper reviews the recent literature on game-theoretic models of market structure and their empirical implementation.

This paper traces the time series (?Growth of Firms?) tradition in the study of market structure and looks at how recent studies on entry and the size distribution of firms have modified thinking in this area.

This paper models uctuations in regional disaggregates as a nonsta- tionary, dynamically evolving distribution. Doing so enables study of the dynamics of aggregate uctuations jointly with those of the rich cross-section of regional disaggregates. For the US, the leading state| regardless of...

Convergence concerns the poor catching up with the rich|if not instan- taneously, then at least having a tendency to do so. When poor and rich here refer to entire economies, then whether convergence occurs is traditionally viewed as just a side consequence of a more central ques- tion, namely...