Evaluating the employment effects of a mandatory job search program

This paper exploits area based piloting and age-related eligibility rules to identify treatment effects of a labor market program – the New Deal for Young People in the UK. A central focus is on substitution/displacement effects and on equilibrium wage effects. The program includes extensive job assistance and wage subsidies to employers. We find that the initial impact of the program significantly raised transitions to unsubsidized employment by about five percentage points. The impact is robust to a wide variety of non-experimental estimators. However we present some evidence that this effect may not be as large in the longer run

Financial constraints and capacity adjustment in the United Kingdom: Evidence from a large panel of survey data

The interrelationship between financial constraints and firm activity is a hotly debated issue. The way firms cope with financial constraints is fundamental to the analysis of monetary transmission, of financial stability and of growth and development. The CBI Industrial Trends Survey contains detailed information on the financial constraints faced by a large sample of UK manufacturers. This paper uses the quarterly CBI Industrial Trends Survey firm level data between January 1989 and October 1999. The cleaned sample contains 49,244 quarterly observations on 5,196 firms. As more than 63% of the observations refer to firms with less than 200 employees, the data set is especially well suited for comparing large and small companies. The data set is presented and a new method of checking the informational content of the data is developed. Whereas the relationship between investment activity and financial constraints is theoretically ambivalent due to simultaneity, the link between financial constraints on the one hand and the prevalence and duration of capacity gaps on the other should be unambiguously positive. Looking at the relationship between both types of constraints, two important results emerge. First, there is shown to be informational content in the survey data on financial constraints. Specifically, financially constrained firms take longer to close capacity gaps. This indicates that financial constraints do indeed play a part in the investment process. Second, small firms close their capacity gaps faster than large firms do, but financial constraints seem to be of higher relevance to their adjustment dynamics. --Financial constraints,investment,capacity adjustment,small firm finance,duration analysis

Changing tradition: New frontiers in spelling instruction : a developmental spelling word study workshop

The purpose of this project is to create a three day workshop focused on a word study curriculum that is based on the developmental theory of spelling. The audience for this workshop would be elementary teachers (first through fifth grade) who are interested in developing a spelling curriculum that is based on current research and individual student needs. The workshop would introduce current research and teach teachers how to analyze student spelling errors. It would also focus on three main questions for developing a word study curriculum: How do I assess and evaluate students?; How do I group and manage students?; and What are daily classroom procedures and instructional practices? The workshop will include hands-on activities and time for teachers to begin designing their own word study curriculum

Unemployment as a social cost

Over the last decade, workfare programmes provided support to the unemployed only insofar as they were willing to accept a job. The theoretical underpinnings of these programmes are that institutional constraints prevent labour supply from adjusting to the technologically determined requirements of labour demand. We contend that when individuals look for a job, they generally want to take into account non-monetary features such as occupational status. Status cannot be traded, it usually is complementary to income, it determines lifestyles and life possibilities. As for labour demand, its requirements do not reflect efficient behaviour and technical constraints because business ”efficiency” cannot be taken to be a measure of social efficiency and technology cannot be used as a benchmark to assess the efficiency of business conduct. We suggest that Sen’s notion of capabilities may constitute an appropriate benchmark to assess the social efficiency of the economic system. This leads us to a few policy implications. The ”capabilities benchmark” leads us to stress the importance of freedom to choose how to conduct one’s life. Acting in favour of freedom involves the understanding of how business strategies affect learning patterns and available choice sets. It also involves the assessment of policy issues - such as cooperation between the scientific community and business, scientific freedom, educational goals and their institutional implementation, and unemployment relief systems - which may influence the relation between business strategies and social learning.

Stylised Features of Price Setting Behaviour in Portugal: 1992-2001

This paper identifies the empirical stylized features of price setting behaviour in Portugal using the micro-datasets underlying the consumer and the producer price indexes. The main conclusions are the following: 1 in every 4 prices change each month; there is a considerable degree of heterogeneity in price setting practices; consumer prices of goods change more often than consumer prices of services; producer prices of consumption goods vary more often than producer prices of intermediate goods; for comparable commodities, consumer prices change more often than producer prices; price reductions are common, as they account for around 40 per cent of total price changes; price changes are, in general, sizeable; finally, the price setting patterns at the consumer level seem to depend on the level of inflation as well as on the type of outlet.

Stylised features of price setting behaviour in Portugal: 1992-2001

This paper identifies the empirical stylized features of price setting behaviour in Portugal using the micro-datasets underlying the consumer and the producer price indexes. The main conclusions are the following: 1 in every 4 prices change each month; there is a considerable degree of heterogeneity in price setting practices; consumer prices of goods change more often than consumer prices of services; producer prices of consumption goods vary more often than producer prices of intermediate goods; for comparable commodities, consumer prices change more often than producer prices; price reductions are common, as they account for around 40 per cent of total price changes; price changes are, in general, sizeable; finally, the price setting patterns at the consumer level seem to depend on the level of inflation as well as on the type of outlet. JEL Classification: E31, E32, L11consumer prices, frequency of price changes, price setting, producer prices

Deeper Capacity Building for Greater Impact: Designing a Long-Term Initiative to Strengthen a Set of Nonprofit Organizations

Offers advice about how to plan, implement, and evaluate long-term, capacity-building initiatives -- sustained efforts to help a select group of nonprofit grantees reach a new level of effectiveness

New exports from emerging markets: do followers benefit from pioneers ?

Since Arrow (1962), spillovers from pioneer to follower in non-excludable innovations are central to our understanding of endogenous economic growth. Nonetheless, evidence of these spillovers in less-developed economies has been elusive. Our paper contributes by showing novel facts consistent with externalities in new export products. To avoid biases towards ex-post successes, we use data on the universe of customs transactions from Chile (1990- 2006). We find that, first, follower firms are more likely to enter a product if the pioneer firm survives exporting. More importantly, we also find that pioneers enter and remain smaller than followers, which is indicative that the first exporter may not be the firm that benets the most from the discovery. This fact is inconsistent with the currently standard view in international trade, in which the largest firm would be the first willing to pay a homogeneous sunk cost of exporting. In contrast, our facts are consistent with the view that smaller pioneer exporters are data producers, whose spillovers benet larger followers. We offer a simple model to formalize this intuition, based on the idea that large exporters have more choices on how to allocate their managerial capacity. This real option makes large exporters wait, as to assign their marginal manager on the best possible project. In contrast, smaller and more focused firms prefer to be pioneers.economic growth; innovation; externalities; first-mover-advantage