A new test is proposed for discriminating between human capital and sorting explanations of the wage differential between groups of variously educated workers. International data from the ISSP are used to illustrate the operation of the test and of other, more conventional methods used to...

Results are reported of a forecasting competition between linear autoregressive, GARCH, threshold autoregressive and neural network models of the UK monthly unemployment rate series. Evidence is uncovered suggesting the existence of nonlinearities in the series.

A quadratic multi-product cost function is estimated for UK universities prior to the abolition of the binary divide. The arguments of the function include linear and interaction terms in undergraduate tuition, postgraduate tuition and research, and in each case these are separately identified...

A new test is proposed for discriminating between human capital and sorting explanations of the wage differential between groups of variously educated workers. International data from the ISSP are used to illustrate the operation of the test and of other, more conventional methods used to...

Data envelopment analysis is applied to the research assessment exercise data collected by the Higher Education Funding Councils in 1992, to study the relative performance of UK university departments of economics. The analysis throws light on returns to scale and on the characteristics deemed...