In the second half of the 20th century, Spain provides a case of political regime change, which according to some political economy models should also lead to a shift in the cyclical nature of fiscal policy. We find that in most of the pre-democratic era, there was a strong procyclical bias to...

Both analysis of international trade and the knowledge resource theory of the firm imply that language skills should play a vital role in exporting. This may be apparent to large multinationals with sites in many different linguistic locations, but we show it is less obvious to smaller...

We construct a Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium model of the interaction between demography and the economy for six centuries of English history. At the core of the four overlapping generations, rational expectations model is household choice about target number and quality of children, as...

The present research shows how entrepreneurial culture contributes to the widely noted difference in entrepreneurial propensities between men and women. The consequences of the assumed differential importance of household and family generate testable hypotheses about the gender effects of...

This paper assesses UK innovation policy impact on a large, population weighted, sample of both service and manufacturing SMEs. By focussing on self-reported innovation the study achieves a wider coverage of the effects of SME innovation policy than possible with more traditional indicators....

New Economic Geography models typically predict centripetal economic development. One process by which this might be brought about is if large companies based in the core of the economy buy up and remove small dynamic enterprises from peripheral regions, thereby suppressing development outside...

This paper investigates whether UK executives use private information in the trading decisions associated with the exercise of their executive stock options. We find that UK executives' exercise and sell decisions are motivated by their private information but not by their anticipation of future...

The 1930s in the UK and USA is remembered as the decade of mass unemployment. We develop a model of equilibrium unemployment based on the Meltzer and Richard (1981) model of redistribution financed by distortionary taxation. This model is extended to the UK and the US interwar period to provide...

Macro models generally assume away heterogeneous welfare in assessing policies. We investigate here within two aggregative models - one with a representative agent, the other a long-used forecasting model of the UK - whether allowing for differences in welfare functions (specifically between...

I consider the problem of assigning agents to indivisible objects, in which each agent pays a price for his object and all prices sum to a given constant. The objective is to select an assignment-price pair that is envy-free with respect to the agents' true preferences. I propose a simple...