This paper decomposes aggregate TFP growth in Britain for 1997-2008 to show the contribution of different LEPs and the role played by manufacturing and services and UK- and foreign-owned plants within these LEPs. These contributions are further decomposed to show the role of productivity growth...

This paper provides a survey and critique of how spatial links are taken into account in empirical analysis by applied economists/regional scientists. Spatial spillovers and spatial interrelationships between economic variables (e.g. unemployment, GDP, etc) are likely to be important, especially...

This paper presents an overview of various models of regional growth that have appeared in the literature in the last 40 years. It considers the past, and therefore supply-side models, such as the standard neoclassical, juxtaposed against essentially demand-side approaches such as the...

This paper examines the determinants of total factor productivity (TFP) using a GB plant-level dataset. Using a systems-GMM approach, it considers the role of the following four plant characteristics: internal and external knowledge; foreign ownership, multi-plant economies of scale and...

Data for the UK show Northern Ireland remains at the bottom of the productivity league table, and that its R&D performance is consistently amongst the lowest across the UK regions. This paper analyses the data from a survey of some 250 matched firms operating in Northern Ireland (approximately...

This study considers the determinants of whether a firm exports, undertakes R&D and/or innovates, and, in particular, the contemporaneous links between these variables using three waves of the UK Community Innovation Survey (CIS). Where appropriate, an instrumental variables procedure is...

In the context of the bond market, empirical tests of the rational expectations hypothesis (REH) have without exception been tests of the time-series properties of interest rates. However, the REH also imposes restrictions on the cross-section of bond yields at each point in time. This study...

This paper suggests a dual to the many-person applied welfare economics problem with constraints on lump-sum redistribution. The dual has the property of minimizing an aggregator function over individual income transfers. The properties of the aggregator are dependent upon the resource costs of...

This paper derives conditions under which prices may be set proportional to margin cost in some sectors of the economy when fixed distortions exist in other sectors. Two simple neo-classical economies are considered -- one with fixed producer prices and one with variable producer prices. In the...