An interesting aspect of British research on unions based on the Workplace Industrial/ Employment Relations Surveys has been the apparent shift in union impact on establishment performance in the decade of the 1990s compared with the 1980s – and the recent scramble to explain the phenomenon....

Recent research on international productivity comparisons with historical data has encountered large discrepancies between benchmark comparisons and time series extrapolations from other benchmarks. Broadberry and Burhop (2005) have recently argued that for Hoffmann's (1965) widely accepted time...

This paper examines whether exporting activity matters for firm?s price cost margins. The recent literature on exporting and productivity shows that exporters on average are more efficient than nonexporters. If that is the case we may also expect them to have different mark-ups. We investigate...

This paper presents an empirical analysis of ?outsourcing? using establishment level data for UK manufacturing industries. We analyse an establishment?s decision to outsource and the subsequent effects of outsourcing on the establishment?s productivity. We compare outsourcing in domestic with...

This paper calculates returns to scale and productivity growth (allowing for non-constant returns to scale) in UK manufacturing establishments in the electronics and food industries. Our results show that foreign establishments tend to have lower returns to scale than their domestic...

This paper focuses on the role of absorptive capacity in determining whether or not domestic establishments benefit from productivity spillovers from FDI. We analyse this issue using establishment level data for the electronics and engineering sectors in the UK. We distinguish the effect of FDI...