Business and investment

This paper presents a model of international trade that features heterogeneous firms, relative endowment differences across countries, and consumer taste for variety.

We study the effects of risk and uncertainty on education and childlabour in developing countries.

Our current understanding of economic growth emphasises the role of new knowledge created by profit-seeking firms as a primary source of long-run growth in GDP and living standards.

We use data on publicly traded U.K. firms to investigate whether financing choices differ systematically with R&D intensity.

We examine whether discretionary government grants influence the location of new plants, and how effective these incentives are in the presence of agglomeration and urbanisation externalities.

The UK's poor productivity performance relative to the US has been a focus for government policy and analysis in recent Budgets and Pre-Budget Reports. The labour productivity gap fell over the early 1990s, when the UK experienced relatively faster growth in business sector labour productivity than the US, but it has since increased again as productivity growth slowed in the UK and accelerated in the US. This aggregate picture hides considerable variation at the industry level. In some industries the gap has narrowed substantially over the past decade, while in others it has widened. As a result, although the total size of the productivity gap did not change very much over the 1990s, the industries that account for the majority of the gap have changed considerably. An understanding of where the productivity gap arises is essential to be able to target policy effectively.

This paper compares public and private firms using the refuse collection costs of 170 firms in 115 Swedish municipalities.

This paper analyses the reported performance of foreign-owned manufacturing subsidiaries in the UK between 1994 and 1998.

This paper shows that the location of economic activity is correlated with the variation in relative wages.

This paper shows that the location of economic activity is correlated with the variation in relative wages.

In this study, we examine the connection between the varied experiences of the transition countries in attracting foreign direct investment (FDI) and their diverse experiences in transforming their tax structures to be consistent with a market economy.

This paper examines the response of industries and firms to changes in trade costs.

In this paper, we offer and discuss new evidence on the performance of British Telecom (BT) before and after privatisation.

Understanding why the UK has performed relatively poorly in terms of R&D is important for predicting whether current policies can halt this decline and ultimately narrow the productivity gap. This Briefing Note documents and disentangles trends in UK R&D over the period 1981-2000.

We consider the impact of taxation when investors face a discrete choice between two or more mutually exclusive projects.

This paper presents a single unified framework that integrates the theoretical literature on Schumpeterian endogenous growth and major strands of the empirical literature on R&D, productivity growth and productivity convergence.