Latest RLAB News
Below are the latest headlines for CEP and STICERD. For full coverage see the
CEP News and Visitors Site and the
STICERD News and Visitors Site
Executive Pay:
Share ownership by institutional investors improves the link to corporate performance
Publicly quoted UK firms with higher levels of institutional ownership of their shares have a stronger and more symmetric link between corporate performance and executive pay.
That is one of the findings of new research by Dr Brian Bell and Professor John Van Reenen of the Centre for Economic Performance (CEP).
Download full press release here
Related links:
Brian Bell webpage
John Van Reenen Webpage webpage
Productivity Programme webpage
What should ministers do? They could take seriously the work of
Professor Richard Layard and others, who have thought about how public policy can help make people happy, and how government can get out of the way of people pursuing their own happiness.
This article appeared in the Independent on 24 April 2012
link to article
Related publications
The World Happiness Report John Helliwell, Richard Layard and Jeffrey Sachs (eds), The Earth Institute Report, April 2012. The Report was commissioned for the April 2nd United Nations Conference on Happiness (mandated by the UN General Assembly) which took place at the UN Headquarters in New York on 2 April 2012
Link to report
Related links
Richard Layard
webpage
Wellbeing Programme
webpage
U.S. education debt can't be discharged through bankruptcy and almost 2 million Americans with student debt are over 60, according to the New York Federal Reserve. About $85 billion in student debt was delinquent in the third quarter of 2011. In March, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said U.S. student-loan debt had reached $1 trillion, based on preliminary findings. "The American system is brutal" said
Tim Leunig who teaches economic history at the London School of Economics.
This article appeared in the The Washington Post on 23 April 2012
link to article
Related links
Tim Leunig
webpage
Globalisation Programme
webpage
Recent work from John Hills and Ben Richards, CASE paper 160 examines the means-tested support which has been offered to English students applying to go to 52 universities from Autumn 2012. Designed partly to offset the rise in general fees to or towards £9,000, 27 of these universities are offering significant levels of means-tested support through bursaries or fee reductions depending on parental income. Using a common income definition, each university has designed its own system with widely varying criteria. Taken with the national maintenance grant system, these imply substantially different levels of support for students from lower and higher-income families.
John Hills discusses on LSE British Policy and Politics blog, the efforts to protect the poorest from some of the effects of the rise in fees, and how‘localised’ decision-making is leading to an increase in the numbers of means tests designed by lower level institutions. He suggest this is creating a very complex and varied approach to student financial support, with high effective marginal taxation rates for some families.
In New Statesman online Gavin Kelly (Resolution Foundation) queries whether this is a tax on aspiration. And in The Guardian online it's discussed how this could potentially undermine policies such as Universal Credit, which aim to simplify the social security system.
This is part of a series of workshops on this theme that Thierry Verdier (Paris School of Economics), Gani Aldashev (Namur), Emmanuelle Auriol (Toulouse School of Economics) and Maitreesh Ghatak (LSE), have been co-organizing for the last two years.
The importance of non-profits in developed countries in the social sectors is well-recognized. At the same time, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) play an ever-increasing and fundamental role in designing and carrying out development projects.
Therefore, the formulation of effective policies towards the development NGO sector requires a good understanding about how NGOs function, how they perform their activities, what is the effect of the NGOs on development.
Given such knowledge, the optimal regulatory framework of the NGO sector can be designed. Thus, both demand for comprehensive body of knowledge about the functioning and performance of the NGO sector is high, both from the policy-makers, the general public,
and the NGOs themselves.
With this in mind, the Economic Organization and Public Policy programme at LSE is hosting the workshop NGO (Non-Profits, Governments, and Organizations) which is being funded by STICERD."
The event will take place 25th and 26th of May 2012. The preliminary program can be found
here
Alex Fenton looks at what happened to poor neighbourhoods under New Labour in the 2000s, and argues that shifting rates in poverty fail to tell the whole story.
Full article available here from the British Politics and Policy at LSE blog
