We analyse a puzzle in the UK corporation tax: by both historic and international standards, corporation tax revenues have been high while the statutory rate has been reduced. We consider explanations based on changes in the tax law and in economic factors. Changes in the tax law, such as...

There has much recent academic and policy interest in the issue of spatial clustering of economic activity, with most attention paid to the geographic concentration of high-tech industries. This paper describes patterns of geographic and industrial concentration in UK production industries at...

This paper investigates a set of strategic decisions facing US firms. We develop a simple theoretical framework in which firms choose whether or not to serve a foreign market, and if so whether by exporting, or by becoming a multinational. The model is applied to a sample of US firms choosing...

The poor productivity performance of the UK and the EU when compared with the US has been a major driver of policy reforms over the past decade. This paper considers what the evidence suggests about why we have lagged behind the US, considering among other factors the importance of globalisation...

Recently the data underlying the Annual Census of Production has been made available to academic economist in the UK. The data provides information on production activity in the UK at the plant level. This paper provides some preliminary description of the data and discuses a few of its...

We investigate the geographic concentration and agglomeration of production activity in the UK at the four-digit industry level using a variety of measures. We relate these to comparable patterns in the US and France and find several similarities. We find that conditioning on industrial...

This paper investigates the determinants of vertical integration. We first derive a number of predictions regarding the relationship between technology intensity and vertical integration from a simple incomplete contracts model. Then, we investigate these predictions using plant-level data for...