1. Human happiness is more affected by whether or not one has a job than by what kind of job it is. 2. Thus, when jobs are to hand, we should insist that unemployed people take them. This involves a much more pro-active placement service and clearer conditionality than applies in many countries....

This is the paper of a lecture held in honour of Rudolf Meidner, attempting to answer the following questions: How far can recovery go before the labour market becomes so tight that inflationary pressures once more get out of hand? In other words, what level of employment in future will be...

This paper was prepared for a conference of economic representatives of the states of the former Soviet Union. The paper argues the case for a code of conduct for inter-state trade and proposes such a code. The paper also includes the revisions proposed by those attending the conference.

Economic organization and economic behaviour in Japan - notably the employment relation, trading relations between business firms and the financing of industrial enterprise - are sufficiently different from prevailing patterns in the UK and the US for it to be reasonable to speak of different...

"The main proposals in this paper have a highly focussed aim: to prevent the continuation in Britain of an increasingly depressed group of under-skilled workers. The main intention is to ensure that all 16-19 year olds and as many adults as possible achieve at least Level 2 qualifications. For...

This paper was originally delivered as a TSB Forum lecture in Glasgow on Thursday 28 October, 1993. Professor Layard argues that unemployment must be reduced permanently below the intolerable levels of the 1980s and early 1990s. To achieve this, reforms must be made in the areas of training and...

"This paper addresses two questions: -Can Welfare-to-Work expand employment and -Has Britain's New Deal for young people actually done so, and have its benefits justified the cost? There is ample evidence that unemployment (and employment) is affected by how the unemployed are treated. Other...

Governments around the world want to develop their ICT and digital industries. Policymakers thus need a clear sense of the size and characteristics of digital businesses, but this is hard to do with conventional datasets and industry codes. This paper uses innovative 'big data' resources to...

Over the last decade the World Management Survey (WMS) has collected firm-level management practices data across multiple sectors and countries. We developed the survey to try to explain the large and persistent TFP differences across firms and countries. This review paper discusses what has...

This paper introduces a new Stata® command, dynemp, which implements a distributed micro-data analysis of business and employment dynamics and firm demographics. The data source it requires are business registers or comparable firm- or establishment- level longitudinal databases which cover the...