Leveraging the sharp changes in environmental regulation embedded in China's 11th Five-Year Plan (FYP), which covered the period from 2006 to 2010, we characterize the degree to which the plan softens trade-offs between emissions and output. We document that the 11th FYP is associated with...

The challenging fiscal situation facing the next government means that both Labour and the Conservatives are looking for ways to improve public services without large increases in spending. Improving the productivity of public services is often proposed as a way to achieve this. This follows the...

The Scottish Government's Budget for 2024-25 takes place at a time of particular uncertainty about the future funding environment. UK government spending plans both for the coming year and for later years seem likely to be topped up, but when and by how much is unclear. The current UK government...

Standard methods for estimating production functions in the Olley and Pakes (1996) tradition require assumptions on input choices. We introduce a new method that exploits (increasingly available) data on a firm's expectations of its future output and inputs that allows us to obtain consistent...

Health is the largest single area of Scottish Government spending, making up 35% of the Scottish Government's total discretionary budget in 2024-25 and 39% of its non-benefit budget.2 Its share of spending has grown significantly over time, driven by large increases in health spending in the...

In West Germany, the average size of establishments declined during the 1990s and started to increase again in the late 2000s, while the employer size wage premium followed the opposite trajectory. In this paper, we show that these two developments are interrelated. More precisely, our results...

This study investigates the impact of firm-level investments in data assets on productivity growth during the COVID-19 pandemic, utilizing matched employer-employee data of 13,609 Finnish firms for 2015-2020. Our estimation results indicate that firms with greater pre-pandemic investments in...

Using a panel regression approach across 13 developing Asian economies from 1996Q1 to 2019Q4, this paper examines the extent of financial development as a transmission channel for mediating the "allocation puzzle" in capital flows. This puzzle pertains to why capital seems to flow to economies...