How best to widen university access - by abolishing fees, as the Tories suggest, or byenhancing student loans, as the government plans?[...]

In this paper the author argues that social scientists need to do more toprovide policy-relevant research. Rapid technological and economicchange raise new issues about how policy should adjust that are notadequately addressed by older and narrower approaches. The authorsuggests two ways in...

This paper is motivated by the lack of any obvious relationship betweenaggregate poverty and unemployment in Great Britain. We derive aframework based on individuals’ risks of unemployment and poverty,and how these vary over the economic cycle. Analysing the BritishHousehold Panel Survey for...

Economic evaluation has an important role in helping to make decisionsabout the use of scarce resources in an explicit and rational manner, yeteconomic evaluation is not well-developed in many areas of socialwelfare. This paper looks at the reasons for this, focusing on whateconomists could do...

The housing system is intrinsically linked to almost every major area of government policy fromthe economy and taxation to the environment and education. It is driven by a huge range offactors from the behaviour of individuals to global economic forces. It is also in most casesthe greatest asset...

The findings set out in this Report challenge the perception of low population support for rights overall - and the view that the public think rights are a “charter” for criminals and terrorists. They support the reasoning of the Joint Committee on Human Rights (JCHR) that economic and...

[...]The work of the National Equality Panel will underpin the response by all strategic publicauthorities to Clause One of the Equality Bill which places a new legal duty on key publicbodies to consider, in all the important decisions they make and all important actions theytake, how they can...

A large empirical literature claims that …fiscal policy in developingcountries is procyclical, in contrast to high-income countries where it is countercyclical. Some authors, however, have questioned this …finding because theliterature has typically ignored endogeneity problems. To settle this...

[...]Die Studie ist wie folgt aufgebaut: In Kapitel zwei werden die zentralen Begriffeund relevanten institutionellen Regelungen im Patentrecht erläutert und dietheoretisch vermuteten Auswirkungen des Patentsystems auf Gründungendiskutiert. In darauffolgenden Kapiteln werden die theoretisch...

Economists generally assume that the state has sufffcient institutional capacityto support markets and levy taxes, assumptions which cannot be taken forgranted in many states, neither historcally nor in today’s developing world.Our paper develops a framework where "policy choices" in market...