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...

Theoretical predictions of the effect of TFP growth on employment are ambiguous, anddepend on the extent to which new technology is embodied in new jobs. We estimate amodel for employment, wages and investment with an annual panel for the United States,Japan and Europe and find that TFP growth...

We use a new industry-level dataset to quantify the role of ICT in explaining productivity growth in the UK, 1970-2000. The dataset is for 34 industries covering the whole economy (31 in the market sector). Using growth accounting, we find that ICT capital played an increasingly important, and...

The US has experienced a sustained increase in productivity growth since the mid-1990s, particularly in sectors that intensively use information technologies (IT). This has not occurred in Europe. If the US "productivity miracle" is due to a natural advantage of being located in the US then we...

This paper assesses the impact of the National Minimum Wage (NMW) on employment and inequality in the UK over the decade since its introduction in 1999. Identification is facilitated by using variation in the bite of the NMW across local labour markets and the different sized year on year up...

The recession of 2008-2009 inflicted a larger cumulative loss of UK output than any of the other post-war recessions. Nevertheless, employment rates remained higher than might have been expected given the experience of previous recessions. The main reasons for this appear to be a combination of...

The recession of 2008-09 inflicted a larger cumulative loss of UK output than any of the previous post-war recessions, yet there has been a relatively low loss of employment, at least so far. Paul Gregg and Jonathan Wadsworth look for an explanation.

This paper examines the importance of social and geographical networks in structuring entry into skilled occupations in premodern London. Using newly digitised records of those beginning an apprenticeship in London between 1600 and 1749, we find little evidence that networks strongly shaped...

We investigate the strategies, HR attributes and their synergies that are associated with superior performance in service SMEs using data from the UK Tourism Hospitality and Leisure (THL) sector. A major advantage of our analysis is that our sample includes information also on very small firms...

If personal computers (PCs) are used to enhance learning and information gathering across avariety of subjects, then a home computer might reasonably be considered an input in aneducational production function. Using data on British youths from the British HouseholdPanel Survey between 1991 and...