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This study investigates the impact of a pay transparency intervention in reducing the gender pay gap in the UK university sector. Introduced in 2007, the initiative enabled public access to average annual earnings disaggregated by gender in UK universities. We use a detailed matched employee‐employer administrative dataset that follows individuals over time, allowing us to adopt a quasi‐experimental approach based on event studies around the intervention. We find that the earnings of female academics increased by around 0.62 percentage points compared to their male counterparts as the control group, whose earnings remained constant after the pay transparency intervention, reducing the gender pay gap by 4.37 per cent. Further evidence suggests that the main mechanism for the fall in the pay gap is driven by female employees negotiating higher wages, particularly among senior female academics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies have shown that external capital account liberalisation can boost capital inflows and augment economic development. Nevertheless, in the case of developing and emerging economies (DEE), adverse currency fluctuations could hamper external competitiveness due to relative price differences creating currency overvaluation, which might not be mitigated via financial openness alone. Therefore, this paper uses annual panel data for 35 DEEs over 40 years to explore whether financial openness of countries can help preserve their external price competitiveness, in the presence of greater trade openness and better institutional quality. Our findings suggest that financial openness alone does not aid export competitiveness, unless it is supported by greater trade openness. In addition, both cross country and regional analyses show that financial openness can benefit economies in maintaining their export competitiveness if they have stronger quality of institutions. Our results remain robust when we estimate the role of financial openness and institutional quality jointly on external competitiveness across regions, and during the pre‐ and post‐crisis periods. We conclude that financial openness alone is not sufficient to improve external competitiveness of an emerging economy, but it does help in the presence of greater trade openness or better institutions, enabling reduction in trade costs and thereby making these countries more price‐competitive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates how the aftermath of the 2008 crisis affected firm productivity in the UK, focusing particularly on the cohort effect of firms established after 2008 – a previously overlooked aspect of the crisis – as well as the interaction with access to credit, which we test using firm‐specific and time‐varying credit scores. For identification, a matched sample is used based on credit score, firm age, size and ownership status, combining propensity score matching with difference‐in‐differences. While we find evidence that smaller firm size and changes in credit conditions affect productivity, about half of the difference in productivity remains unexplained. When we extend the matching analysis to examine across sectors and cohorts, we find that the low productivity performance during the years 2011–2016 is driven primarily by newer firms in the services sector, rather than in manufacturing. Within services, the underlying productivity puzzle is driven by a cessation of output growth in high‐productivity financial services, while abundant labour supply has led to a 'levelling down' of performance of newer firms in other services, converging towards the relatively low‐productivity manufacturing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do firms with majority female ownership differ from firms with minority female ownership or male‐owned firms in terms of perceived constraints on accessing finance? Using World Bank Enterprise Survey (WBES) data for Indian firms, our results show that there is no significant difference in male‐ and female‐owned firms in terms of their perceptions about accessing finance. Yet, this is true only for firms with minority female ownership (less than 50%). Firms with majority female ownership do perceive more constraints on accessing finance relative to firms with minority female ownership or zero female ownership. Based on demand‐ and supply‐side factors relating to business inexperience, weaker networking, and lender perceptions, as suggested by signalling and gender congruity theories, the results imply that majority‐female‐owned firms need to negotiate more for financing access, as they need to display positive signals for those investors who might possess stereotypical and gendered beliefs about the abilities of entrepreneurs. We also find that in relation to funding sources being one's own retained earnings or money from family and friends or advances from clients, majority‐female‐owned firms do not perceive financial barriers differently from male‐owned firms or firms with minority female ownership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we use time‐varying VAR models to study the effects of option‐implied measures of equity and bond market volatilities on the government bond term premium and key macroeconomic variables. We show that the high correlation between the two volatilities requires the shocks to these variables to be jointly identified. We find that a positive shock to the VIX reduces the term premium. We interpret this effect as the result of investors shifting their portfolios away from riskier assets. Also, a positive shock to the VIX has contractionary and disinflationary effects. By contrast, a positive shock to the Merrill Lynch Option Volatility Expectations (MOVE), which reflects heightened uncertainty about future changes in interest rates, raises the term premium. Similar to a VIX shock, an increase in bond market volatility also has a contractionary effect, although the negative effects on output and inflation are smaller. Both VIX and MOVE shocks resemble negative demand shocks, albeit of different intensity, to which the central bank responds by easing monetary policy. Depending on the type of volatility impacting the economy, a contraction in output can be associated either with a flattening or steepening of the yield curve. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature lacks consensus on the role of currency regimes in explaining external competitiveness. Countries not only differ in terms of currency regimes, but can also have different institutional arrangements, namely trade agreements and inflation targeting (IT) frameworks in addition to the overall quality of governance. Hence, using the real effective exchange rate and by covering 35 developing countries over the period 1975–2014, we investigate the role of currency regimes in explaining the degree of misalignment while considering institutional factors. First, we find that intermediate regimes limit the currency misalignment with greater financial openness (FO). Second, non-reciprocal preferential trade agreements improve price competitiveness, whereas free trade and reciprocal ones can only be beneficial with a higher degree of FO. Third, misalignments in fixed regimes decline in the presence of stronger institutions or in countries with an IT type of monetary policy framework. The above results remain robust to alternative specifications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]