GDP per worker fell for the five years after 2008 which is unprecedented in post war UK history. In this paper we argue that “capital shallowing” (i.e. the fall in the capital-labour ratio) could be the main reason for this. This is likely to have occurred due to changes in factor prices: a...

The financial crisis has generated a deep revision of the regulation of securities and derivatives markets. In this paper, we critically examine the extent to which current reforms, such as the European Market Infrastructure Regulation and the proposed new Markets in Financial Instruments...

As member states struggle to retain the investment grades necessary to allow them to finance their governmental operations at a reasonable cost, credit rating agencies (CRAs) have been blamed for exacerbating a procyclical bias which only makes this task more difficult. How CRAs contribute to...

A dynamic panel data model is considered that contains possibly stochastic individual components and a common fractional stochastic time trend. We propose four different ways of coping with the individual effects so as to estimate the fractional parameter. Like models with autoregressive...

Subjects donate individually (control group) or in pairs (treatment group). Those in pairs reveal their donation decision to each other. Average donations in the treatment group are significantly higher than in the control group. Paired subjects have the opportunity to revise their donation...

This paper presents estimates of key preference parameters of the Epstein and Zin (1989, 1991) and Weil (1989) recursive utility model, evaluates the model's ability to fit asset return data relative to other asset pricing models, and investigates the implications of such estimates for the...

When he came to power in 1997, Tony Blair reacted to widening disparities between poorer and richer neighbourhoods by declaring that no one in future decades should be seriously disadvantaged by where they lived. This paper reviews the policies that Labour pursued and assesses how close it came...

We investigate the impact of information about student satisfaction on university choice, using data from the UK’s National Student Survey (NSS) and on applications to undergraduate degree courses. We show that the NSS has a small, statistically significant effect on applications at the...

This paper is concerned with the urban wage premium and addresses two central issues about which the field has not yet reached a consensus. First, the extent to which sorting of high ability individuals into urban areas explains the urban wage premium. Second, whether workers receive this wage...

We propose a management insulation index based on banks’ charter and by-law provisions and on the provisions of the applicable state corporate law that make it difficult for shareholders to oust a bank’s management. We show that banks in which managers were more insulated from shareholders...