LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 

About: LSE Research Online Documents on Economics is an academic journal. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Unemployment & Productivity. Over the lifetime, 1615 publications have been published receiving 20574 citations.

Creative cities: the cultural industries and the creative class

Abstract: The aim of this article is to critically examine the notion that the creative class may or may not play as a causal mechanism of urban regeneration. I begin with a review of Florida's argument focusing on the conceptual and theoretical underpinnings. The second section develops a critique of the relationship between the creative class and growth. This is followed by an attempt to clarify the relationship between the concepts of creativity, culture and the creative industries. Finally, I suggest that policy-makers may achieve more successful regeneration outcomes if they attend to the cultural industries as an object that links production and consumption, manufacturing and service. Such a notion is more useful in interpreting and understanding the significant role of cultural production in contemporary cities, and what relation it has to growth.

An anatomy of economic inequality in the UK: report of the National Equality Panel

Abstract: Britain is an unequal country, more so than many other industrial countries and more so than a generation ago. This is manifest in many ways - most obviously in the gap between those who are well off and those who are less well off. But inequalities in people's economic positions are also related to their characteristics - whether they are men or women, their ages, ethnic backgrounds, and so on. The independent National Equality Panel, was established at the invitation of the Rt. Hon. Harriet Harman, Minister for Equality to report on the relationships between inequalities in economic outcomes and differences related to people's characteristics.

Social licence and environmental protection: why businesses go beyond compliance

Abstract: Traditionally, corporations which complied with the dictates of applicable legislation would have regarded not just their legal, but also their social obligations, as ending at that point. Socio-legal research suggests that corporations complied with law only for instrumental reasons (to avoid legal penalties) or, because "regulations are taken to be a measure of societal expectations, and [are] thus interpreted as a guide to an organisation's moral and social duties," (Wright, 1998: 14). From this traditional point of view, corporations could be expected to take actions which went 'beyond compliance' only where they saw some self-interest in doing so, such as increasing profit, usually over the short-term (Porter and Van der Linde, 1995)

The family gap in pay:evidence from seven industrialized countries

Abstract: In this paper, we use microdata on employment and earnings from a variety of industrialized countries to investigate the family gap in pay – the differential in hourly wages between women with children and women without children. We present results from seven countries: Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, Finland, and Sweden. We find that there is a good deal of variation across our sample countries in the effects of children on women’s employment and in the effects of children on women’s hourly wages even after controlling for differences between women with and without children in characteristics such as age and education. We also find that the variation in the family gap in pay across countries is not primarily due to differential selection into employment or to differences in wage structure across countries. We suggest that future research should examine the impact of family policies such as maternity leave and child care on the family gap in pay.

Flight to quality, flight to liquidity, and the pricing of risk

Abstract: We propose a dynamic equilibrium model of a multi-asset market with stochastic volatility and transaction costs. Our key assumption is that investors are fund managers, subject to withdrawals when fund performance falls below a threshold. This generates a preference for liquidity that is time-varying and increasing with volatility. We show that during volatile times, assets' liquidity premia increase, investors become more risk averse, assets become more negatively correlated with volatility, assets' pairwise correlations can increase, and illiquid assets' market betas increase. Moreover, an unconditional CAPM can understate the risk of illiquid assets because these assets become riskier when investors are the most risk averse.