Earnings and linguistic proficiency in a bilingual economy

[…] researched. Typically studies find that bilingual workers are disadvantaged. Governments often protect minority languages through official promotion of bilingualism, with potential economic consequences. This paper addresses the impact of bilingualism on earnings, using the example of Wales. Results show a positive raw differential of 8 to 10 per cent depending on definition of linguistic […]

Debt and financial expectations: an individual- and household-level analysis

In this article we show that optimistic financial expectations impact positively on both the quantity of debt and the growth in debt at the individual and household levels. Our theoretical model shows that this association is predicted under a variety of plausible scenarios. In the empirical analysis we explore the determinants of debt and […]

Shareholder primacy and the distribution of wealth

[…] the result that shareholder primacy is in reality the primacy of a small privileged elite. After an exploration of the contradictions of working class shareholding and the impact of greater shareholder-orientation on the distribution of wealth, the paper concludes by re-evaluating Hansmann and Kraakman’s ‘end of corporate history’ thesis, arguing that recent developments represent […]

Rising to the challenge: will the NHS support people with long term conditions?

[…] term conditions. In the foreword, John Reid, the secretary of state for health, outlines how a “major investment in services closer to home will ensure much better support for patients who have long-term conditions, enabling them to minimise the impact of these on their lives.”2 We discuss how the NHS might rise to this challenge.

Neighbourhood social capital and neighbourhood effects

[…] and behavioural patterns by their neighbours, with interpersonal conversation being the main means of transmitting such influence. Although there is an increasing body of evidence showing the impact of such conversations that people who talk together, vote together relatively little of this has grounded the geography of such conversations in the individuals’ local neighbourhoods. […]

A Meta-Analytic Assessment of the Effect of Immigration on Wages

[…] increasingly interconnected and open world, international migration is becoming an important socio-economic phenomenon for many countries. Since the early 1980s, many studies have been undertaken of the impact of immigration on host labour markets. Borjas (2003) noted that the estimated effect of immigration on the wage of native workers varies widely from study to […]

Social capital and health: does egalitarianism matter? A literature review

[…] search on electronic databases for peer-reviewed published literature. We categorize studies according to level of analysis (single and multilevel) and examine whether studies reveal a significant health impact of individual and area level social capital. We compare the study conclusions according to the country’s degrees of economic egalitarianism. Regardless of study design, our findings […]

The ins and outs of poverty in advanced economies: government policy and poverty dynamics in Canada, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States

[…] compares poverty dynamics in four advanced industrial countries (Canada, unified Germany, Great Britain, and the United States) for overlapping six-year periods in the 1990s, focusing on the impact of government policies. The data indicate that relative to measured cross-sectional poverty rates, poverty persistence is higher in North America than in Europe. Most poverty transitions, […]