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Researchers perpetually complain about long decision lags. Glenn Ellison (2002a,b) confirms that delays are being longer. He suggests an evolving social norm as a possible explanation, with more demands made on authors for their work to be published. Time delays have the additional effect, however, of limiting the flow of submissions. In the absence of time delays and other significant submission costs, the best strategy is to start at the most prestigious journal and work down until the article is accepted. Better journals are unlikely to welcome this. The major submission cost is the long and unpredictable length of time spent waiting for a decision. Ellison notes that time lags are longer for the top five economics journals, at around six to eleven months longer than the rest. Despite the increasing prestige of top journals, the number of submissions remains fairly static.

The Fourth National Survey of Ethnic Minorities contains useful information about the language ability of Britain's non-whites as well as a wealth of comparative information for whites. The paper attempts to establish how much of the lower unemployment and higher earnings enjoyed by whites is the result of a comparative advantage in language. Language is shown to contribute to a part of the non-white disadvantage, but after language effects are removed non-whites males still have higher unemployment rates and lower earnings. Language disadvantage among non-white females leads to higher inactivity rates rather than more unemployment.

Individuals from ethnic minorities have a greater tendency to stay on in full-time education beyond the compulsory age. There are, however, wide variations between groups, and the paper explores the role for human capital considerations such as earnings and increased employability in this choice. Economic considerations and socioeconomic background are found to be important, but there is evidence for a separate ethnicity effect influencing choice. The method used is to fit a joint leaving and employment equation for males and females aged 18-24 using combined micro data from the British Labour Force Survey and the Sample of Anonymized Records from the 1991 Census.

Derek Leslie Connolly is a Consultant Interventional Cardiologist at Birmingham City Hospital (UK). He qualified from the University of Edinburgh (UK) summa cum laude in Pharmacology in 1985 and in Medicine in 1988 where he was the Brunton Medalist. As a Carnegie scholar at the University of California, San Diego (CA, USA) he saw the early promise of angioplasty and changed his career plan from cardiac surgery to coronary intervention. He then spent a decade training in Cardiology in Cambridge (UK) where he held a British Heart Foundation PhD Fellowship at the University of Cambridge. His main clinical and research interest is the detection and treatment of atherosclerosis. He was appointed to his current role in 2000 and has been integral to the early development of both primary angioplasty and cardiac CT programs. He was UK Chief Investigator for the FOURIER trial.

The declining employment fortunes of Britain's non-white communities, relative to whites, are explained. To achieve this comparison, some historical official sources of unemployment data are reviewed. The earliest known official time series on unemployment of non-whites dates back to 1960. This historical context is explored, especially the reluctance to make the early data more widely known. An unemployment series for non-white males and females from 1970 to 1999 is derived in two separate ways by splicing together official sources. These series are compared with unemployment of whites to demonstrate a relative increase in unemployment of non-whites.

A theory is developed to measure the quality of applicants into UK higher education. It is based on the principle that more able applicants will self-select into more difficult subject choices. The advantage is that it gives a unidimensional measure whereby different groups can easily be compared across any dimension of interest, e.g. men, women and the various ethnic groups. Here the relative quality of applicants and acceptances across 170 separate subject groups is calculated and discussed by using a data set with over 2 million observations. It, therefore, offers a way of achieving a more refined measure of the quality of human capital.

The wage bargain in insider-outsider theory lies on the labor demand schedule. Generically, this type of bargain is known as a right-to-manage contract. Implicit contracts are restricted to the class of efficient contracts, which rule out, except in special circumstances, such right-to-manage contracts. An integrated approach would enrich both theories. Whereas implicit contracts ignore important institutional detail, insider-outsider theory benefits from a systematic treatment of uncertainty, which implicit contract theory can provide. One criticism of the implicit contract model is that the utilitarian objective function of the workers makes hiring a random draw, whereas seniority rules prevail in reality. One advantage of integrating insider-outsider ideas is that they have a seniority rule interpretation. Outsiders can be considered as the junior workers and insiders the senior workers.

It is 20 years since Britain passed legislation to combat racial discrimination. Despite this, evidence presented in this paper suggests that Britain's non‐white ethnic minorities still do not appear to face a level playing field in the UK labour market and their relative position does not appear to have improved since the 1970s. Native ethnic minorities also appear to be faring little better than their parents. It is in gaining employment that the situation is particularly acute.