Poland has tackled its economic problems with courage and, thus far, success. Hyperinflation has ceased, the well-chosen exchange rate has held, and wage behaviour has been responsible.A major recession is under way, and it must not become endemic. A big export effort is needed, followed with...

The view that the stock market is myopic is commonly expressed in the financial press. However, the existing econometric evidence does not support this view. In this paper, we report econometric evidence suggesting that the market attaches too high a weight to current dividends relative to...

This paper derives and then estimates a model of employment where unions and firms bargain over wages and possibly employment, and efficiency wage considerations may be important. It illustrates the difficulties involved in interpreting many existing attempts to discriminate between alternative...

This paper attempts to assess the relative importance of firm-specific factors (i.e., insider forces) in wage determination. Using firm-level data on 219 UK companies over the period 1974-82, it finds that a 1% rise in a firm's prices or productivity relative to the aggregate economy leads to a...

A key feature of OECD economic growth since the early 1970s has been the secular decline in manufacturing’s share of GDP and the secular rise of service sectors. This Paper examines the role played by relative prices, technology, factor endowments and labour market institutions in the process...

This paper asks whether immigration to Britain has had any impact on average wages. There seems to be a broad consensus among academics that the share of immigrants in the workforce has little or no effect on the pay rates of the indigenous population. But the studies in the literature have...

Following the fall in overall net public investment, the relative pay of most public sector workers in the United Kingdom declined sharply after the mid-1970s. For example, the relative pay of male teachers fell by over 10 percentage points from the late 1970s to the late 1980s. So has this...

Relative poverty in the UK has risen massively since 1979 mainly because of increasing worklessness, rising earnings dispersion and benefits indexed to prices, not wages. The economic force underlying this is the significant shift in demand against the unskilled. This has substantially weakened...

This paper considers three aspects of the job insecurity facing British men in the last two decades. The probability of becoming unemployed, the costs of unemployment in terms of real wage losses and the probability that the continuously employed will experience substantial real wage losses. The...