• Publicationsclose
• Other research productsclose
• Book close
• GB close
• English close

This policy note spells out lessons for rural policy that emerge from recent SERC research. It summarises a SERC policy paper available at http://www.spatialeconomics.ac.uk/textonly/SERC/publications/download/sercpp008.pdf

How can the diffusion and development of women's cricket as a global sport be explained? Women 's Cricket and Global Processes considers the emergence and growth of women's cricket around the world and seeks to provide a sociological explanation for how and why the women's game has developed the way it has.

Firms’ expectations play a central role in modern macroeconomic models, but little is known empirically about how these are formed or whether they matter for economic outcomes. Using a novel panel data set of manufacturing firms’ expectations about prices and wage rates, new orders, employment and unit costs for the United Kingdom, we document a range of stylized facts about the properties of firms’ expectations and their relationship with recent experience. There is wide dispersion of expectations across firms. Expected future price and wage growth are influenced by firm-specific factors but macroeconomic factors also matter. Expectations of employment and new orders are influenced by firm-specific measures of past orders while expected unit costs seem to be influenced more by firm-specific cost pressures and aggregate import prices. After controlling for a wide range of variables we find a significant connection between past expected price and wage increases and their out-turns. But there is also strong evidence that firms’ expectations are clearly not rational.

I document that employment share change and wage growth of occupations tend to increase monotonically with various measures of skill intensity since 1980 in the US, in contrast to the existing interpretation of labor market polarization along occupational wages. The observation is not particularly driven by a specific decade, gender, age group, or occupation classification. The evidence suggests that polarization by wages does not imply polarization of skills that have cross-occupation comparability. Skill-biased and polarizing occupation demand coexist as a result of the weak connection of wage and observable skill structure particularly among the low-wage jobs in the 1980. The empirical findings of the paper can be reconciled in an extended version of the canonical skill-biased technical change model which incorporates many occupations and within-occupation heterogeneity of skill types.

While skilled immigration ceteris paribus provides an immediate boost to GDP per capita by adding to the human capital stock of the receiving economy, might it also reduce the number of ’good jobs’, i.e. those with training, available to indigenous workers? This paper analyzes this issue theoretically and empirically. The theoretical model shows how skilled immigration may affect the sectoral allocation of labor and how it may have a positive or negative effect on the training and social mobility of native born workers. The empirical analysis uses UK data from 2001 to 2018 to show that training rates of UK born workers have declined in a period where immigration has been rising strongly, and have declined significantly more in high wage nontraded sectors. At the sectoral level however this link is much less strong but there is evidence of different effects of skilled immigration across traded and non-traded sectors and evidence that the hiring of UK born workers in high wage non-traded sectors has been negatively affected by skilled immigration, although this effect is not large. Taken together the theoretical and empirical analyses suggest that skilled immigration may have some role in allocating native born workers away from ’good jobs’ sectors but it is unlikely to be a major driver of social mobility.

The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) is considered one of the most important regional entities in the world. It provides a framework for stability regarding world oil and gas supplies and facilitates great wealth from oil and gas exports. After 30 years of promises from GCC countries, however, how does oil and gas wealth impact actual economic development, particularly in the non-oil economy and private sector? This study highlights the existence of economic development in the GCC states based on three aspects: the current demographic structure, economic growth and diversification, and the role of private sector development. The analysis shows that an imbalanced population structure causes a great drain on national income and turns the national population into a minority in some of the GCC states. Furthermore, its economy still depends heavily on oil revenue, resulting in public sector domination. As a result, the private sector is underdeveloped and still does not exert significant influence on economic development. The study concludes that, in spite of the GCC article’s declaration regarding the association between development and integration, the GCC is still far from demonstrating real long-term development.

This set of tutor's notes provides an indispensable insight in to the CIM Postgraduate Professional Diploma in marketing Analysis and Decision case study.

We examine the change in the effect of market structure on hospital quality for elective procedures (hip and knee replacements, and coronary artery bypass grafts) following the 2006 loosening of restrictions on patient choice of hospital in England. We allow for time-varying endogeneity due to the effect of unobserved patient characteristics on patient choice of hospital using Two Stage Residual Inclusion. We find that the change in the effect of market structure due to the 2006 choice reforms was to reduce quality by increasing the probability of a post-operative emergency readmission for hip and knee replacement patients. There was no effect of the choice reform on hospital quality for coronary bypass patients. We find no evidence of self-selection of patients into hospitals, suggesting that a rich set of patient-level covariates controls for differences in casemix.

In this paper we propose a model-based method to cluster units within a panel. The underlying\ud model is autoregressive and non-Gaussian, allowing for both skewness and fat tails, and the units\ud are clustered according to their dynamic behaviour and equilibrium level. Inference is addressed\ud from a Bayesian perspective and model comparison is conducted using the formal tool of Bayes\ud factors. Particular attention is paid to prior elicitation and posterior propriety. We suggest priors\ud that require little subjective input from the user and possess hierarchical structures that enhance\ud the robustness of the inference. Two examples illustrate the methodology: one analyses economic\ud growth of OECD countries and the second one investigates employment growth of Spanish\ud manufacturing firms.