Union membership and density in Britain has experienced substantial decline since 1979. The fall in private sector membership and density has been much greater than in the public sector. The size of the union sector, measured by employer recognition, has shrunk. Membership decline has been...

The May 2007 issue of the Journal of Monetary Economics published a paper of mine entitled 'Investment-Specific Technological Progress and Growth Accounting' which critiqued the work of Greenwood, Hercowitz and Krusell. I argued that the Greenwood-Hercowitz-Krusell (GHK) model is a special case...

Microeconomic efficiency and market transparency argue in favour of UK membership in EMU and for Scotland's membership in the UK monetary union and also in EMU. UK seigniorage (government revenues from money issuance) would be boosted by EMU membership. Lender of last resort arrangements would...

The paper develops a model of trade union behaviour based on the concept of the viable bargaining unit. Bargaining unit viability rests on five conditions; membership level, service level, membership participation, employer recognition and facilities. Viability is achieved by mobilisation of...

Why are some cities specialised and others diversified? What are the advantages and disadvantages of urban specialisation and diversity? To what extent does the structure of cities, and the activities of the firms and people in them, change over time? How does the sectoral composition of cities...

Economies at early stages of development are often shaken by abrupt changes in growth rates, whereas in advanced economies growth rates tend to be relatively stable. To explain this pattern, we propose a theory of technological diversification. Production makes use of different input varieties,...

Common wisdom states that teenage childbearing reduces schooling, labour market experience and adult wages. However, the decisions to be a teenage mother, to quit school, and be less attached to the labour market might all stem from some personal or family characteristics. Using the National...

Why would an entrepreneur hire a manager? It could be because managers are particularly talented people. This paper suggests another reason. We consider a model with asymmetric information between financiers and entrepreneurs which gives rise to sizable inefficiencies. Under simple conditions,...

Yields to maturity of a set of nominal and index linked gilts are used to obtain estimates of the term structures of nominal and real interest rates. These allow calculation of the term structures of nominal and real interest rates. These also allow calculation of expected inflation. The...

In this paper we model a job-specific shock process in the matching model of unemployment with non-cooperative wage behaviour. We obtain endogenous job creation and job destruction processes and study their properties. We show that an aggregate shock induces negative correlation between job...