There is widespread concern currently that some ethnic minority communities within Britain, especially Muslim, are not following the stereotypical immigrant path of economic and cultural assimilation into British society. Indeed, many seem to have the impression that differences between Muslims...

We study the role of employment protection legislation (EPL) in determining firm size distribution. In manycountries the provisions of EPL are more stringent for firms above certain size thresholds. We construct asimple model that shows that the smooth relation between size and growth...

We estimate the harm from smoking during pregnancy upon child birth outcomes, using a rich dataset on a cohort of mothers and their births. We exploit a fixed effects approach to disentangle the correlation between smoking and birth weight from the causal effect. We find that, despite a detailed...

Although there is a large literature on the economic effects of minimum wages on labour market outcomes (especially employment), there is hardly any evidence on their impact on firm performance. This is surprising: minimum wages appear to have a significant impact on wages, but only a limited...

This paper studies the effects of firing taxes on the job destruction rate, when probationperiod - or temporary contract - policies are implemented in an otherwise exogenous jobseparation search model. It is shown that contrary to conventional wisdom, firing taxescan amplify the job turnover...

A striking fact about prices is the prevalence of ``sales': large temporary price cuts followed by a return exactly to the former price. This paper builds a macroeconomic model with a rationale for sales based on firms facing consumers with different price sensitivities. Even if firms can vary...

This paper argues that existing models of urban concentrations are incomplete unless grounded in the most fundamental aspect of proximity; face-to-face contact. Face-to-face contact has four main features; it is an efficient communication technology; it can help solve incentive problems; it can...

We present a dynamic comparative advantage model in which moderate reductions in trade costs can generate sizable increases in trade volumes over time. A fall in trade costs has two effects on the volume of trade. First, for given factor endowments, it raises the degree of specialization of...

The emergence of the so-called ¿network economy¿ and the development of project-basedwork pose a fundamental challenge to established methods of regulating the employmentrelationship. There appears to be an unsatisfied demand for its greater use, especially amongemployers, and it is argued...

This paper takes a new look at the issue of overseas sourcing of services. In framework in which comparative advantage is endogenous to agglomeration economies and factor mobility, the fragmentation of production made possible by the new communication technologies and low transportation costs...