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This paper revisits the UK productivity puzzle using new data on outputs and inputs and clarifying the role of output mismeasurement, input growth and industry effects. Our data indicate an implied labour productivity gap of 13 percentage points in 2011 relative to the productivity level on pre‐recession trends. We find that: (a) the labour productivity puzzle is a TFP puzzle, since it is not explained by the contributions of labour or capital services; (b) the reallocation of labour between industries deepens rather than explains the puzzle (i.e. there has been a reallocation of hours away from low‐productivity industries and toward high productivity industries); (c) capitalization of R&D does not explain the productivity puzzle; (d) assuming increased scrapping rates since the recession, a 25% (50%) increase in depreciation rates post‐2009 can potentially explain 15% (31%) of the productivity puzzle; (e) industry data show that 35% of the TFP puzzle can be explained by weak TFP growth in the oil & gas and finance sectors; and (f) cyclical effects via factor utilization could potentially explain 17% of the productivity puzzle. Continued weakness in finance would suggest a future lowering of TFP growth to around 0.8% p.a. from a baseline of 0.9% p.a. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The decision in 1847 to cut Treasury spending on public relief efforts during the Irish famine is generally attributed by economic historians to the pervasive influence of 'laissez-faire' ideas on the Whig government of Lord John Russell. This article draws on the papers of political leaders and contemporary financial information to argue that economic reasons were the trigger for the change in policy. Robert Peel and Charles Wood's macroeconomic policies of the 1840s, including the gold standard, the Bank Charter Act, and corn law repeal, left the Whigs unable to borrow to finance relief efforts in Ireland without panicking markets. The scaling back of public assistance programmes that resulted from this-and which increased mortality at the height of the Irish famine-was the unintended result of Peel and Wood's economic policies, in the context of the Whig government's parliamentary weakness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This unique evaluation aimed to estimate, the financial impact of non‐attendance on a nation‐wide hospital lymphoedema service. Along with gaining some understanding of patient characteristics of those who Did Not Attend (DNA) and were subsequently discharged. The evaluation design interrogated existing performance data from 2012 to 2022. This information was used to estimate the costs incurred based on national published sources and pay scales. Staffing costs of over £1.1 m in one decade related to the financial impact of over 23 000 unattended lymphoedema appointments. The characteristics of 870 patients from 2019/2020 were also evaluated suggesting that those with a wound alongside complex lymphoedema were less likely to DNA appointments. Two‐thirds of patients were managing two or more comorbidities—obesity, cardiac conditions and diabetes being the most common. It seems likely that some DNAs are avoidable by adapting appointment administrative processes and greater understanding of patients' perception of value. However, the reasons for DNA are likely to be varied and nuanced so potentially a small proportion are unavoidable. Modernising appointment processes and identifying patient value may help minimise DNA costs in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policy PointsNudges steer people toward certain options but also allow them to go their own way. "Dark nudges" aim to change consumer behavior against their best interests. "Sludge" uses cognitive biases to make behavior change more difficult.We have identified dark nudges and sludge in alcohol industry corporate social responsibility (CSR) materials. These undermine the information on alcohol harms that they disseminate, and may normalize or encourage alcohol consumption.Policymakers and practitioners should be aware of how dark nudges and sludge are used by the alcohol industry to promote misinformation about alcohol harms to the public. Context: "Nudges" and other behavioral economic approaches exploit common cognitive biases (systematic errors in thought processes) in order to influence behavior and decision‐making. Nudges that encourage the consumption of harmful products (for example, by exploiting gamblers' cognitive biases) have been termed "dark nudges." The term "sludge" has also been used to describe strategies that utilize cognitive biases to make behavior change harder. This study aimed to identify whether dark nudges and sludge are used by alcohol industry (AI)–funded corporate social responsibility (CSR) organizations, and, if so, to determine how they align with existing nudge conceptual frameworks. This information would aid their identification and mitigation by policymakers, researchers, and civil society. Methods: We systematically searched websites and materials of AI CSR organizations (e.g., IARD, Drinkaware, Drinkwise, Éduc'alcool); examples were coded by independent raters and categorized for further analysis. Findings: Dark nudges appear to be used in AI communications about "responsible drinking." The approaches include social norming (telling consumers that "most people" are drinking) and priming drinkers by offering verbal and pictorial cues to drink, while simultaneously appearing to warn about alcohol harms. Sludge, such as the use of particular fonts, colors, and design layouts, appears to use cognitive biases to make health‐related information about the harms of alcohol difficult to access, and enhances exposure to misinformation. Nudge‐type mechanisms also underlie AI mixed messages, in particular alternative causation arguments, which propose nonalcohol causes of alcohol harms. Conclusions: Alcohol industry CSR bodies use dark nudges and sludge, which utilize consumers' cognitive biases to promote mixed messages about alcohol harms and to undermine scientific evidence. Policymakers, practitioners, and the public need to be aware of how such techniques are used to nudge consumers toward industry misinformation. The revised typology presented in this article may help with the identification and further analysis of dark nudges and sludge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public goods and services such as prisons are often underfunded compared with private goods and services. Social impact bonds (SIBs) are a new financial vehicle to increase the use of private funds for public good. SIBs use a paid‐for‐success, performance‐based structure to reallocate risk and reward. In the current case, the SIB changes a critical reinforcing loop from a vicious cycle of decay to a virtuous cycle of improvement that can perpetuate SIB benefits far after the bond has been repaid. A simulation model of recidivism at Her Majesty's Prison (HMP) Peterborough and the related SIB is developed to identify high‐leverage parameters and dominant feedback loops. These are used to explain SIB success or failure for two primary participants (HMP system and SIB investors). Model analysis also reveals a tipping point structure that puts the Peterborough programme at risk. Contributions include a formal SIB model, improved understanding of SIB structure and behaviour, an example of tipping point structures in a social system and recommendations concerning SIB design and management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the historical significance of the increasing precariousness of labor, even in the most advanced economies. Given the sterility of the mainstream approach, based on methodological individualism, we start from a Marxist critique of political economy, focusing on the laws that govern the process of capitalist accumulation and its contradictions. Within the framework of these laws, we analyze the tendency of labor exploitation to increase in a capitalist economy, linked to the exigencies of profitability due to the increasing difficulties of the valorization of capital. The precariousness of labor is studied around some of the main forms it adopts in three European economies: mini‐jobs in Germany, "zero‐hours contracts" in the United Kingdom, and false self‐employment, together with internship and training contracts, in Spain. Based on theoretical and empirical analysis, several conclusions are proposed to understand the extension and deepening of labor precariousness, built on the notions of overexploitation and destruction of productive forces, linked to current demands of capitalist accumulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides information on bioethical issues related to mental health, particularly focusing on digital mental health tools, affordability of these tools, the impact of financial stress on mental health, and environmental factors contributing to poor mental health. It emphasizes the need for action, including the introduction of appropriate legislation and addressing health inequalities, to tackle these issues on a broader scale.

This article takes a case study approach to the question of how entrepreneurs developed and used networks to support trade during the American Revolutionary War (American War of Independence). Using the business letter books of Daniel Eccleston of Lancaster, covering January 1780 to December 1781, the article shows how he used trust-building activities and developed open networks in Britain and the West Indies in order to build, sustain, maintain, and diversify his commercial activities to reduce risk and develop new opportunities. Eccleston's letters illustrate a competitive market in which entrepreneurs helped drive the industrial revolution through stimulating demand and encouraging trade. They show that mutual trust was the foundation of strong networks, and that networks were significant in underpinning entrepreneurial success through allowing the mitigation of business risk and offering the opportunity for diversification supported by the network. The article makes use of the work of Casson, Pearson and Richardson, and Wilson and Pop. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fifteenth century rebates to the fifteenth and tenth form a large body of evidence which has rarely been used to assess economic change. They were set by local commissioners who employed their knowledge of the conditions within their counties. In many cases the commissioners can be demonstrated to have applied the reductions in a thoughtful and proportionate manner, often revealing local economic conditions. There is considerable variation in their application between counties and their use is greatly enhanced when compared with other sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the decades prior to the Civil War, Spain experienced a rapid process of urbanization, which was accompanied by the demographic transition and sizeable rural-urban migrations. This article investigates how urban housing markets reacted to these far-reaching changes, which increased demand for dwellings. To this end, this study employs a new hedonic index of real housing prices and constructs a cross-regional panel dataset of rents and housing price fundamentals. This new evidence indicates that rents were not a significant financial burden on low-income families and, hence, housing was affordable for the working classes. The article also shows that families' access to new homes was facilitated by a sizeable growth in the housing supply. Substantial investments in urban infrastructure and the institutional framework enabled the construction of new homes at affordable prices. Our results suggest that housing problems were not as pervasive during the urban transition as the literature often seems to claim. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to conventional wisdom, the fall of the Swedish currency in September 1931 was caused by the sterling crisis. This article shows that the road towards devaluation began earlier and that financial linkages with Germany proved to be more important than Sweden's economic and monetary relations with Great Britain. It all started in late 1929 when the Swedish financier Ivar Kreuger gave a loan to the German government in exchange for the match monopoly, thus tying his business ventures to Germany's solvency. In addition, a part of this loan was financed by large US dollar credits from the two largest Swedish banks that, in turn, accumulated a sizeable foreign short-term deficit. When in June 1931 the German fiscal crisis began to escalate, international investors ceased to consider Sweden a safe haven because they knew about the linkages between the German government, Kreuger, and the Swedish banking system. This downgrading, in combination with the foreign short-term deficit of the banking sector, proved lethal for the reserve position of the Swedish central bank, once the international liquidity crisis in mid-July 1931 erupted. The sterling crisis only put the final nail in the coffin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the Great Recession, UK households reduced real food expenditure. We show that they were able to maintain the number of calories that they purchased, and the nutritional quality of these calories, by adjusting their shopping behaviour. We document the mechanisms that households used. We motivate our analysis with a model of shopping behaviour in which households adjust shopping effort and the characteristics of their shopping basket in response to economic shocks. We use detailed longitudinal data and focus on within-household changes in basket characteristics and proxies for shopping effort. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses how the health consumer and patients' organizations (HCPOs) in Great Britain have been influenced by the changes in policy and political environment, focusing on the threats and opportunities for HCPOs. It suggests that the developments presented both opportunities and challenges for HCPOs while seeking to influence policy, which include the promotion of choice and competition in public services, austerity measure and the British National Health Service (NHS) reform.

The enthusiasm of British portfolio investors for US industry in the late 1880s has been seen as evidence of the liberalism of the London Stock Exchange and the conservatism of the New York Stock Exchange. Based on a study of Anglo- American brewing issues on the London market between 1888 and 1892, in this article it is argued that such an interpretation cannot be sustained. For these issues, securing access to the London market proved more demanding than accounts of its liberalism would lead us to expect: in fact, Anglo- American brewing companies submitted to strictures from London that were more constraining than those of the New York market. Promoters accepted London's constraints to take advantage of the high valuations assigned to Anglo- American brewing securities there, which reflected the city's success in building demand based on financial machinery that did not exist in New York. That machinery included underwriting syndicates, accounting standards, and the London Stock Exchange's listing rules, although, from this perspective, it was the rigour of the exchange's rules that was important. Still, vetting securities for quotation was not the same as for investment, as the disappointing performance of the Anglo- American brewing securities soon revealed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Corruption by office holders in eighteenth-century British institutions, from state to local level, played an instrumental role in the emergence of modern bureaucracy, and the development of accountable, professionalized systems of administration. Due to the similarities between the institutional culture of eighteenth-century Britain and those within many contemporary developing societies, social scientists have also sought to draw lessons from Britain's historical experience of corruption. Yet little is known about the extent, impact, and causes of corruption by eighteenth-century office holders. This article presents the first detailed research into the topic. It utilises the rich administrative and financial records associated with the institution charged with funding and undertaking the maintenance of London Bridge-the Bridge House-to conduct a systematic qualitative and quantitative study of corruption by office holders. The article identifies an ingrained culture of corruption amongst Bridge House officers, and provides quantitative evidence of the substantial impact corruption had on the organization's finances. However, contrary to existing studies on corruption, this article concludes that, although extensive and significant, corruption did not perform a functional role in the context of this institution. The article also provides a methodology and comparator for future studies into this topic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using ownership and control data for 890 firm-years, this article examines the concentration of capital and voting rights in British companies in the second half of the nineteenth century. We find that both capital and voting rights were diffuse by modern-day standards. However, this does not necessarily mean that there was a modern-style separation of ownership from control in Victorian Britain. One major implication of our findings is that diffuse ownership was present in the UK much earlier than previously thought, and given that it occurred in an era with weak shareholder protection law, it somewhat undermines the influential law and finance hypothesis. We also find that diffuse ownership is correlated with large boards, a London head office, non-linear voting rights, and shares traded on multiple markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The early twentieth century constituted the heyday of the 'breadwinner-homemaker' household, characterized by a high degree of intra-household functional specialization between paid and domestic work according to age, gender, and marital status. This article examines the links between formal workforce participation and access to resources for individualized discretionary spending in British working-class households during the late 1930s, via an analysis of household leisure expenditures. Leisure spending is particularly salient to intra-household resource allocation, as it constitutes one of the most highly prioritized areas of individualized expenditure, especially for young, single people. Using a database compiled from surviving returns to the Ministry of Labour's national 1937/8 working-class expenditure survey, we examine leisure participation rates for over 600 households, using a detailed set of commercial leisure activities together with other relevant variables. We find that the employment status of family members other than the male breadwinner was a key factor influencing their access to commercial leisure. Our analysis thus supports the view that the breadwinner-homemaker household was characterized by strong power imbalances that concentrated resources-especially for individualized expenditures-in the hands of those family members who engaged in paid labour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]