Stephen Bond (Gwilym Gibbon Research Fellow in Public Economics) continued to work half-time at Nuffield, in association with a half-time position at the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

He continued to work on a wide range of research projects. A project with Dietmar Harhoff (Munich) and John Van Reenen (UCL) investigates the effects of financing constraints on investment and R&D spending by British and German firms; during the year this was extended to look at the productivity of R&D spending in the two countries. A project with Lucy Chennells (IFS) studies the relationship between company ownership structures and dividend payout behaviour. A project with Nicholas Bloom (IFS) and John Van Reenen (UCL) looks at the impact of uncertainty on company investment spending. A project with Costas Meghir (UCL) and Frank Windmeijer (IFS) investigates the impact that the threat of being taken over has on productivity in UK companies. A project with Michael Devereux (Warwick) investigates properties of alternative corporate tax structures. Other work with Richard Blundell (UCL) and Frank Windmeijer (IFS) explores the properties of alternative estimators for dynamic panel data models, particularly in the context of estimating firm-level production functions.

During the year, Bond spent three weeks in New York visiting the economics departments at New York University and Columbia. He started to work on a new project with Jason Cummins (NYU), investigating the relationship between share prices, analysts’ forecasts of future profits, and company investment spending. Early results suggest that a substantial proportion of share price movements are unrelated to expectations of future profits, and contain little or no information about company investment.

During this year Bond also wrote a survey covering microeconometric models of investment and employment (with John Van Reenen (IFS)), and began work on a survey of the debate about corporate tax harmonization in Europe (with Lucy Chennells (IFS) and Michael Devereux (Warwick)).

Bond continued to run the ESRC Econometric Study Group, and to serve as a member of the ESRC’s Politics, Economics and Geography Research College. He visited Trondheim to give a course on panel data econometrics for the Scandinavian PhD Programme.