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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 study analyzes the impact of knowledge spillovers on output per worker at the industry level using a primal production function approach. The article makes three different contributions to the international spillovers literature: (1) it identifies trade-related spillovers under alternative assumptions regarding the information transferred through imports; (2) it explores the importance of horizontal and vertical foreign direct investment (FDI) in knowledge spillovers; and (3) it looks at how institutional factors determine the impact of FDI-related spillovers on productivity. The main findings of the study are: (I) international knowledge spillover is an important driver of industry output per worker, and the magnitude of this spillover effect varies with alternative assumptions about the information content embodied in imports, while high technology industries benefit significantly more from import-related knowledge spillovers; and (2) the gains from FDI spillovers are primarily horizontal, but when institutional factors are considered, countries with stronger protection of intellectual property rights and a high 'ease of doing business' tend to experience a substantial increase in the effectiveness of both horizontal and vertical FDI-related spillovers. (JEL E24, Fl, F6, 03, 04), I. INTRODUCTION Improving the level of productivity is widely regarded as the main source of welfare and economic prosperity. Over the last 50 years, economic literature has identified various drivers [...]