Rachel is Research Director of the IFS and Co-Director of the Centre for the Microeconomic Analysis of Public Policy (CPP). She is Professor of Economics at the University of Manchester, a Fellow of the British Academy, a Fellow of the Econometric Society, a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Economic Association and a Research Fellow of CEPR. Rachel won the Birgit Grodal award in 2014, was awarded a CBE in for services to economic policy in 2015 and was made a Dame for services to economic policy and education in 2021. Her research considers the relationship between government policy and economic performance. Her specific interests relate to empirical industrial organisation, the retail food sector, nutrition, innovation, productivity and corporate tax.
Education
PhD Economics, Keele University, 1999
MSc Econometrics and Forecasting, City of London Polytechnic, 1991
BA (Magna cum Laude) Economics, University of Massachussets , 1985
We analyse a puzzle in the UK corporation tax: by both historic and international standards corporation tax revenues have been high while the statutory rate has been low.
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.
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.
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.
We investigate the geographic concentration and agglomeration of production activity in the UK at the four-digit industry level using a variety of measures.
The government intends to introduce a new research and development (R&D) tax credit, which will be open to larger firms, in Budget 2002. It has issued a second consultative note, Designs for Innovation, on the design of the new credit. This Briefing Note discusses which firms are likely to benefit from the new credit, and the likely costs and effectiveness of the designs under consideration.
