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A study on rate of employment achieved by foreign-owned startups based in north-east England is presented. The study relates to the period from 1985 to 1998. It is observed that most of the foreign-owned companies achieve the projected job creation targets. However, larger plants lag a bit.

The paper constructs a consistent series for UK central government expenditure on industrial subsidies over the post-war period, valuing incentives in grant equivalent terms from the position of a firm undertaking investment appraisal. The analysis includes direct subsidy payments, as well as tax allowances, and provides a disaggregation between those subsidies available on a national, regional and sectoral or firm specific basis. A time-series analysis of the assembled data shows important differences between these components, with regional assistance performing a long-run distributive role, while other elements perform a stabilisation function. The short-run patterns are broadly constant across governments, but the long-run relationships exhibit structural breaks related to both political and economic events., A study was conducted to create a consistent series for UK central government expenditure on industrial subsidies from 1946-1990. Incentives in grant equivalent terms were valued from the perspective of a firm performing investment appraisal. Time-series analyses results showed that regional assistance plays a long-run distributive role, while the other factors have a stabilizing function.

The 'digital divide' in online activities is believed to arise from differences in Internet access, but this paper advances an alternative explanation that is related to consumer search ability. It argues that this leads to greater price dispersion, causing some consumers to be discriminated against. It analyses price data for the UK Internet motor insurance market, collecting data on 32,255 prices for 110 sub-markets, where differences in price dispersion across these by age, occupation and sex of the driver are argued to reflect differences in search ability. Allowing for price dispersion to also depend on the insurance risk, it finds greater price dispersion for consumers with weaker search abilities, i.e. older, unemployed, retired or female consumers. As this is not explained by alternative hypotheses, the paper concludes that improved Internet access alone will not close the 'digital divide'. The implication is that policymakers should address the online search abilities of individuals as well as Internet access. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents abstracts of various articles related to economics and statistics, published in the May 1, 1996 issue of the journal Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics. "Multiple Regression Analysis of the Occupational Status of Twins: A Comparison of Economic and Behavioural Genetics Models," by Paul Miller, Charles Mulvey and Nick Martin compares the performance of a model with the conventional fixed effects model in the analysis of data on twins in the study of economic well-being. Unlike the fixed-effects model that has traditionally been estimated in the economics literature, the model studied provides explicit controls for genetic and shared environmental factors. "Internal and External Forces in Sectoral Wage Formation: Evidence From the Netherlands," by Johan J. Graafland and Marcel H. C. Lever investigates the relative importance of internal and external forces in sectoral wage formation in the Netherlands. "Earnings, Independence or Unemployment: Why Become Self-Employed?" by Mark P. Taylor estimates the role played by three key variables on the paid employee decision using a simple three stage utility maximization model.