This paper examines the pattern of U.K. self-employment income inequality between 1976 and 1991, and develops a simple model of the size distribution. Inequality measures are related to the parameters of this distribution, whose economic determinants are explained. It is found that the principal...

Employees are significantly more likely to quit small rather than large firms to found new ventures. I examine empirically three alternative theories that might explain this finding: a transmission theory; a blocked mobility theory; and self-selection of workers. A representative sample of...

This introductory, non-technical, article offers a reflective overview of what Economics adds to our understanding of entrepreneurship. It is designed primarily to showcase to young entrepreneurship scholars several interesting research questions and a toolbox of methods to answer them. First, I...

After bank finance, borrowing from family and friends is the chief source of funds for new business start-ups in many countries, including the UK. Yet there has been virtually no treatment of this issue in the literature to date. We rectify this omission by developing a model of lending...

Maximum likelihood cointegration methods are used to analyze the determinants of house prices in each of the eleven regions of the United Kingdom. Broad similarities in the structure of house price equations are found across regions in England and Wales (but not Scotland or Northern Ireland),...

Do banks deny credit to new start-ups? The presumption that they do has motivated government intervention in several forms, including publicly backed loan guarantee schemes in the UK and elsewhere. This paper presents an overview of the modern theory and evidence of credit rationing, and...

This paper applies the techniques of stochastic optimal control to the problem of price-taking agents choosing the optimal balance between self-employment and paid employment. The two principal innovations are the development of an intertemporal optimizing model for heterogeneous agents under...

Previous research has identified non-diversifiable risk and a preference for "being one's own boss" as key determinants of participation in self-employment. Using a simple model of occupational choice, I show how both factors can cause efficiency losses in a free market economy, and how linear...

The author presents a framework for discriminating between fixed and floating exchange rate systems and illustrates it with U.K. data over 1975-90. It is found that a fixed parity system would have been unambiguously preferred to a floating system over this period unless the parity were set...

By associating mobility with the unpredictability of social states, new measures of social mobility may be constructed. We propose a family of three state-by-state and aggregate (scalar) predictability measures. The first set of measures is based on the transition matrix. The second uses a...