This paper uses panel data on british manufacturing industries between 1973 and 1985 to examine the relationship between productivity and labour organization. It is shown that the relationship between unions and productivity levels is sensitive to the econometric specification. The evidence...

The level of real wages is one of the key variables-perhaps the key variable-in the economy. Understanding the processes by which wage levels are determined has proved a major task for economists, both theoretical and applied. Much of the effort has taken place within the context of the 'NAIRU'...

Although it is nearly two years since the Government reformed the system of local business rates to introduce a uniform business rate, the debate still continues over the merits of the new system. The importance of local business rates should not be underestimated. The non-domestic rates' yield...

This article investigates whether the returns to education vary with the level of cognitive ability. Unlike much of the literature, this article finds that the return to schooling is lower for those with higher cognitive ability indicating that education can act as a substitute for observed...

This paper investigates whether teenagers are educationally advantaged if their parents are educators, using PISA data for Great Britain and Ireland. It examines whether teachers’ children do better at tests of reading ability. The results show that children whose fathers teach at third level...

This paper uses semi-parametric econometric techniques to investigate the relationship between basic skills and earning in three post-communist countries: the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovenia using the IALS dataset. While the large increases in the returns to education in the new market...

In this paper a rich and innovative dataset, the International Adult Literacy Survey, is used to examine the impact of functional literacy on earnings. We show that the estimated return to formal education is sensitive to the inclusion of literacy: excluding it biases the return to education in...

This paper uses longitudinal data from the National Cohort Development Study (NCDS) to investigate the determinants of voter turnout in the 1997 British General Election. It introduces measures of cognitive ability and personality into models of electoral participation and finds that firstly,...

In a 2005 paper Kanezawa proposed a generalisation of the classic Trivers- Willard hypothesis. It was argued that as a result taller and heavier parents should have more sons relative to daughters. Using two British cohort studies, evidence was presented which was partly consistent with the...

This paper outlines an econometric model of the level of burglary in Ireland between 1952 and 1998. We explain the evolution of the trend in Burglary in terms of demographic factors: in this case the share of young males in the population, the macro-economy in the form of consumer expenditure...