One potential channel through which the effects of the minimum wage could be directed is that firms who employ minimum wage workers could have passed on any higher labour costs resulting from the minimum wage in the form of higher prices. This study looks at the effects of the minimum wage on...

This paper summarizes inequalities in PC ownership using data from the US Consumer Expenditure Survey (CE) and the British General Household Survey (GHS) for the period 1984-98. Between 1988 and 1994, British households were more likely than US households to own a personal computer (PC). After...

Recent evidence suggests that unemployment benefit recipients search more extensively than non-recipients. It is conceivable that benefit claimants, looking for work in a more formal search environment, enjoy an informational advantage relative to non-claimants. This paper examines how such an...

The convergence hypotehsis has genreated a huge empriical literature: this paper critically reviews some of the earlier key findings, clarifies their implications, and relates thme to more recent results. Particular attention is devoted to interpreting convergence empirics. The mian finding s...

Can the increasing significance of knowledge-products in national income - the growing weightless economy - influence economic development? Those technologies reduce 'distance' between consumers and knowledge production. This paper analyzes a model embodying such a reduction. The model shows how...

Many cultural products have the same nonrival nature as scientific knowledge. They therefore face identical difficulties in creation and dissemination. One traditional view says market failure is endemic: societies tolerate monopolistic inefficiency in intellectual property (IP) protection to...

One-in-forty manufacturing settlements involved a strike during the 1980s. Strike days lost were equivalent to half a day for each worker in manufacturing. On average, for the decade as a whole, real pay increases where there was a strike were 0,7 per cent a year higher than settlements without...

This paper shows how standard methods can be used to formulate and estimate a dynamic index model for random fields - stochastic processes indexed by time and cross section where the time-series and cross section dimensions are comparable in magnitude. We use these study dynamic co-movements of...

Following the unification of the two Germanies in October 1990, the former German Democratic Republic was subject to a series of economic shocks, resulting in large declines in output and employment. This paper investigates the behaviour of the East German labour market during the initial stages...

We provide an overview of recent empirical research on patterns of cross-country growth. The new empirical regularities considered differ from earlier ones, e.g. the well-known Kaldor stylized facts. The new research no longer makes production function accounting a central part of the analysis....