Bulletin January 2008

IN THIS ISSUE...

Hazardous times
This problem of moral hazard has been much debated on both sides of the Atlantic in the past three months, but a new CEPR paper provides support for the view that the recent 'credit crunch' crisis is partly of the central banks' own making.

Pitching in for the team
Bosses who send their staff to build rafts or race go-karts in elaborate 'team-building' exercises presumably hope the resulting burst of solidarity will boost workers' performance. But new research suggests that employees are not always spurred into greater effort by their colleagues.

Like mother, like son? Educational outcomes across generations
A new CEPR paper examines the connections between parents' schooling and their children's performance in the classroom, and find that providing a better education to women has strong and long-lasting positive effects on the lives of their offspring.

What difference does distance make?
An attempt to assess the risk that thousands of services jobs are set to disappear overseas, using a concept of economic 'distance', previously applied to manufacturing, to quantify the costs to firms of having services performed thousands of miles away instead of on-site.