A model of female labour supply in which supply is dependent upon the chances of finding a job

In this paper, we extend a model of female labour supply, by considering the impact of the local labour market. Thus, in our model, a woman supplies her labour if she has both made the decision to participate and found a job. This extension is of particular importance in times of high unemployment when discouraged worker effects will be at their strongest. We also consider the contribution of such a model to the debate concerning the labour supply of women married to men who are unemployed.     

UK charity accounting: An exercise in widening stakeholder engagement

Given the economic and social impact of the charity sector in the United Kingdom (UK), the importance of good governance has been recognised as a basis for underpinning effective and efficient performance, and for ensuring that charities meet the legitimate aspirations of key stakeholders. A major aspect of this is high-quality accounting and reporting. Over the past 25 years attempts have been made to improve this through the medium of successive, evolving versions of a Statement of Recommended Practice (SORP) for charities. As a foundation for the future review of the SORP (expected to be published in 2015), the SORP Committee undertook its largest ever consultation on an accounting pronouncement. This paper presents the findings of that consultation and, analysing them using stakeholder theory, concludes that this ambitious exercise facilitated much wider stakeholder engagement than had been experienced before and has the potential to legitimise further the SORP.     

Further reading

On the Dynamics of Growth and Debt By Casper van Ewijk Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1991. viii + 220pp. ISBN 0 19 828346 6.

Hillier, B. (1991), The Macroeconomic Debate: Models of the Closed and Open Economy. Basil Blackwell, Oxford.

Citizens, Consumers and Councils By John Gyford Macmillan, London, 1991. 215pp. Hard cover £35.00, ISBN 0 333 52534 5; paper cover £9.99, ISBN 0 333 52535 3.

Trapped in Poverty ? Labour‐Market Decisions in Low‐Income Households By Bill Jordan, Simon James, Helen Kay and Marcus Redley Routledge, London, 1992. 350 pp. £40.00.

Politics and Policy‐Making in Northern Ireland By Michael Connolly. Philip Allan, Hemel Hempstead, 1990. 178 pp.     

Economics at the FCC, 2008–2009: Broadband and Merger Review

This article focuses on the topic of the National Broadband Plan, which the FCC is mandated to provide to Congress February 17, 2010, the FCC Merger Review process, and the determination of optimal penalties for violations of FCC rules or orders.     

Economics at the Federal Communications Commission: 2006–2007

This article focuses on media ownership and spectrum auction design. These two issues have not only been particularly important at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) over the last year, but also are being informed by economic analysis either completed at the FCC or commissioned by the FCC.     

The Manhattan Metaphor

Fixed operating costs draw a sharp distinction between endogenous growth based on horizontal and vertical innovation: a larger number of product lines puts pressure on an economy’s resources; greater productivity of existing product lines does not. Consequently, the only plausible engine of endogenous growth is vertical innovation whereby progress along the quality or cost ladder does not require the replication of fixed costs. Is, then, product variety expansion irrelevant? No. The two dimensions of technology are complementary in that using one and the other produces a more comprehensive theory of economic growth. The vertical dimension allows endogenous growth unconstrained by endowments, the horizontal provides the mechanism that translates changes in aggregate variables into changes in product-level variables, which ultimately drive incentives to push the technological frontier in the vertical dimension. We show that the potential for exponential growth due to an externality that makes entry costs fall linearly with the number of products, combined with the limited carrying capacity of the system due to fixed operating costs, yields logistic dynamics for the number of products. This desirable property allows us to provide a closed-form solution for the model’s transition path and thereby derive analytically the welfare effects of changes in parameters and policy variables. Our Manhattan Metaphor illustrates conceptually why we obtain this mathematical representation when we simply add fixed operating costs to the standard modeling of variety expansion.