Placements and degree performance:do placements lead to better marks, or do better students choose placements?

There has been a strong move recently to make degrees more applicable to employment; including work placements as part of the programme is one way of achieving this. Such placements are advocated to increase employability, but also for improving academic performance. This paper examines the relationship between undertaking a work placement and the class of degree achieved. It challenges earlier findings that undertaking a placement increases degree results. Studying seven cohorts of students, a well tested approach was employed that allows for sample selection – i.e. whether better students do placements rather than whether placements produce better students. The paper concludes that the sample selection is much stronger, i.e. placement students do better because they are better students. The results highlight that it is not merely doing a placement that matters, but a successful placement adds significantly to subsequent performance. The paper concludes with advice to students and policy makers

Wages and labour productivity in the foreign owned sector of the UK A comparison with domestically owned firms and implications for UK manufacturing

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:DX174278 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Spillovers from FDI and local networks: the importance of transactional linkages and vertical keiretsu in Japan

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to explore the importance of host country networks and organisation of production in the context of international technology transfer that accompanies foreign direct investment. Design/methodology/approach - The empirical analysis is based on unbalanced panel data covering Japanese firms active in two-digit manufacturing sectors over a seven-year period. Given the self-selection problem affecting past sectoral-level studies, employing firm-level panel data is a prerequisite to provide robust empirical evidence. Findings - While Japan is thought of as being a technologically advanced country, the results show that vertical productivity spillovers from FDI occur in Japan, but that they are sensitive to technological differences between domestic firms and the idiosyncratic Japanese institutional network. FDI in vertically organised keiretsu sectors generates inter-industry spillovers through backward and forward linkages, while FDI within sectors linked to vertical keiretsu activities adversely affects domestic productivity. Overall, our results suggest that the role of vertical keiretsu is more prevalent than that of horizontal keiretsu. Originality/value - Japan’s industrial landscape has been dominated by institutional clusters or networks of inter-firm organizations through reciprocated, direct, and indirect ties. However, interactions between inward investors and such institutionalised networks in the host economy are seldom explored. We investigate the role and characteristics of local business groups, in the form of keiretsu networks, to determine the scale and scope of spillovers from inward FDI to Japanese establishments. This conceptualisation depends on the institutional mechanism and the market structure through which host economies absorb and exploit FDI

Some further empirical evidence on the impact of oil price changes on petrol prices

This paper analyses the asymmetries in the response of petrol prices to oil price shocks. We show that previous work, based on the determination of asymmetric responses, can be improved upon by allowing for asymmetries in short term dynamics. The paper shows that a significant determinant of the response of petrol prices to oil price changes, is the extent to which petrol price can be seen to have departed from its long run equilibrium level.Petrol Price, Oil Prices, Asymmetric Adjustment, Non-Linearity, Cointegration,

Industrial Policy, FDI and Employment: Still ‘Missing a Strategy’

Industrial policy, Regional policy, FDI, Employment, F23, R12, L5, R58,