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This article presents a general but very simple model in which the supply of labour to an individual employer is not infinitely elastic but the employer can also raise employment by increasing expenditure on recruitment. Using this, it is shown how that division between perfect competition and monopsony is whether there are diseconomies of scale in recruitment. Using a unique British data set containing information on both labour turnover costs and the number of recruits we present estimates that do suggest that there is an increasing marginal cost of recruitment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article presents a test for perfect competition in the deposit market of the UK retail-banking sector. The model employed draws from the New Economic Industrial Organisation (NEIO) technique forwarded by Hannan and Liang [1993]. The test is applied to a sample of eight UK retail banks between 1992-97. The presence of perfect competition is rejected for all banks. The empirical evidence does not support qualitative evidence of increasing competitiveness amongst UK retail banks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assesses the extent and sources of the UK's comparative advantage within the European Union (EU). It finds that both inter-industry and intra-industry trade are important despite clear aggregation effects. Having established that there is a significant degree of inter-industry specialization the sources of this are analysed, using a factor-content approach. Results are reported for aggregate factors of production and, in the case of labour, by disaggregated skill categories. A key finding is that the UK's net trade with the EU is driven more by a specialization in specific types of skill than by an overall endowment of human capital. The results also suggest that the inter-industry specialization cannot be explained by comparative advantage alone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]