Moving Towards Estimating Sons' Lifetime Intergenerational Economic Mobility in the UK

Estimates of intergenerational economic mobility that use point in time measures of income and earnings suffer from lifecycle and attenuation bias. They also suffer from sample selection issues and further bias driven by spells out of work. We consider these issues together for UK data, the National Child Development Study and British Cohort Study, for the first time. When all three biases are considered, our best estimate of lifetime intergenerational economic persistence in the UK is 0.43 for children born in 1970. Whilst we argue that this is the best available estimate to date, we discuss why there is good reason to believe that this is still a lower bound, owing to residual attenuation bias.     

Evaluating the impact of performance-related pay for teachers in England

This paper evaluates the impact of a performance-related pay scheme for teachers in England. Using data which matches individual pupils to individual teachers, and contains both test scores and value-added, we test whether the introduction of a payment scheme based on pupil attainment increased teacher effort. Our evaluation design controls for pupil effects, school effects and teacher effects, and adopts a difference-in-difference methodology. We find that the scheme did improve test scores and value added increased on average by about 40% of a grade per pupil.     

Pro-producer regulation and accounting for assets: The case of electric utilities

This paper's thesis is that rate-of-return regulation of the electric utility industry was a pro-producer regulatory policy, and that supra-competitive returns were earned by regulated utilities even while their accounting rate-of-returns met the ‘fair’ return constraint established by law. It is argued that this was accomplished by using the accounting system to revalue upward the asset bases of regulated utilities. The empirical results support this hypothesis in that utilities regulated by state commissions had abnormally high book values for their assets compared with unregulated utilities in 1917 and 1922.     

The Disappearing Relationship Between Directors' Pay and Corporate Performance

In this paper we investigate the relationship between the remuneration of the highest paid director and the economic performance of approximately 300 large UK companies over the 1980s and early 1990s. The rate of growth of directors' remuneration was very high over this time period (about 20 per cent per year on average) and very weakly linked to corporate performance. Any such link breaks down after 1988, when the very high pay awards received by top directors in the recessionary period up to 1991 appear to be unrelated to the performance of their companies, whether corporate performance is measured using stock market data or using accounting data on earnings per share. Rather, it appears that corporate growth is an important determinant of the change in directors' remuneration. These results strongly call into question the effectiveness of current systems of pay determination for top company directors.     

Exclusive dealing and the pullman sleeping car corporation

The current paper discusses exclusive dealing in the context of the litigation which involved the sleeping car industry in the 1940's. Both efficiency and exclusionary considerations are analyzed. A novel aspect of the paper is its consideration of staggered contract expiration dates as a means of deterring entry.     

Intergenerational wealth transmission in Great Britain

We document the intergenerational wealth transmission between adult offspring and their parent's using the Wealth and Assets Survey for Great Britain. We estimate an intergenerational wealth elasticity of 0.4 and Rank-Rank elasticity of 0.3 and find intergenerational wealth transmission for individuals in their 60s is lower than for those currently aged in their 30s and early 40s, though rank based estimates are stable. Our estimation results imply that the intergenerational wealth elasticity is 3.8 percentage points higher when comparing people with those the same age 6 years previously suggesting strong evidence of higher intergenerational wealth persistence in younger age cohorts. Taken together, the findings have important implications for future wealth inequalities and must be addressed.     

COVID-19 and Long-Term Economic Growth

This article investigates the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the long-term economic growth of South Africa. We embed an epidemiological model in a modified Solow–Swan model and explore various channels such as morbidity, mortality, unemployment, loss of school days and capital accumulation. We demonstrate that COVID-19 will lower the average annual growth rate of GDP per capita of South Africa by 0.07 percentage points in the next four decades, a 25 per cent decline relative to the no-COVID benchmark. We show that human capital losses due to school closures account for more than half of the economic slowdown.