Declining Concentration in UK Manufacturing? A problem of measurement

It has become conventional wisdom that market concentration in the UK has fallen over recent history. However, the typical assumption has been that all imports are competitive so that any increase in import penetration implies a decline in market concentration. In a world of transnationally organized production and trade this would seem an inappropriate working assumption. Our analysis of the UK market for cars, vans, trucks and buses, where the necessary detailed firm data is available, supports this contention: an accurate assessment of who controls imports is crucial in the measurement of market concentration.     

The Impact of Enterprise Zones on Job Creation in Mississippi

The designation of enterprise zones has been touted as an effective tool in efforts to reduce poverty, but scant evidence exists to support this. In 1983, Mississippi passed legislation authorizing the creation of enterprise zones in the most distressed counties of the state as a way of directing new jobs toward those areas. This study examines the effect of enterprise zone designation on the creation of jobs in new or expanding manufacturing establishments. Using a model estimated from panel data, the study found that qualifying as an enterprise zone had a positive effect on a county's rate of job creation. (JEL O180 , H710 )     

The regulatory tax and house price appreciation in Florida

Much attention was given to the soaring price of housing that took place in different parts of the country in the 1990s and the first half of the current decade. Traditional explanations for the increase include rising land values and costs of construction, but a strand of literature, popularized by Glaeser et al. [Glaeser, Edward L., Gyourko, Joseph, Saks, Raven, 2005a. Why have housing prices gone up? National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper #11129; Glaeser, Edward L., Gyourko, Joseph, Saks, Raven, 2005b. Why is manhattan so expensive? Regulation and the rise in housing prices. The Journal of Law and Economics 48(2)], has looked at the role of land use regulations and posits that complying with them imposes a regulatory tax on housing consumers. In this paper, we apply and extend Glaeser and Gyourko’s methodology in order to estimate the regulatory tax on an individual house level in a set of Florida metropolitan areas. Our novel data address some of the quality measurement concerns raised about the Glaeser and Gyourko methodology and allow us to look at the evolution of the regulatory tax over a 10-year period. We find that the tax is an important component of sales price and that as a percentage of sales price has increased in a majority of Florida’s MSAs. In addition, we decompose the overall house price increase into land, materials and regulatory components and find that increasing stringency in the regulatory environment within Florida represents a substantial portion of the run-up in house prices in most metropolitan areas.     

Performance pay and assortative matching

We show that couples sort on performance pay with dual receipt couples much more likely than predicted by random. In addition, we show that the return to performance pay appears largely invariant to whether one's spouse earns performance pay. The major exception is that among the college educated, the return to performance pay is larger for women when their spouse also receives performance pay. Thus, dual receipt households concentrate the returns to performance pay hinting that performance pay may influence the distribution of household income.     

Adoption and Diffusion of Natural-Resource-Conserving Agricultural Technology

A national sample of U.S. farms is used to estimate the long-term trends in adoption and diffusion of conservation tillage, IPM, and soil fertilizer testing, technologies designed to reduce environmental externalities from agriculture. Results from a duration model show that diffusion of these technologies has been relatively slow, with long lags in adoption due to differences in land quality, farm size, farmer education, and regional factors.     

How remote is the offshoring threat?

Advances in communication technology make it possible for workers in India to supply business services to head offices located anywhere. This has the potential to put high-wage workers in direct competition with much lower paid Indian workers. Service trade, however, like goods trade, is subject to strong distance effects, implying that the remote supply of services remains limited. We investigate this proposition by deriving a gravity-like equation for service trade and estimating it for a large sample of countries and different categories of service trade. We find that distance costs are high but are declining over time. Our estimates suggest that delivery costs create a significant advantage for local workers relative to competing workers in distant countries.     

'Worth So Appallingly Little': A Workplace-Level Analysis of Low Pay

Using Britain's 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey, this paper investigates the characteristics of establishments paying low wages immediately prior to the introduction of the UK's National Minimum Wage in April 1999. It demonstrates that a range of personal, oragnizational and environmental factors are related to the incidence of low pay. These relationships are more complex than previously suggested. In particular, that between establishment size and low pay is moderated by whether the establishment is part of a larger organization; the incidence of low pay is high in single establishments and low in small establishments that are part of large organizations.