An industry in decline provides an appropriate setting for the theory that mergers and acquisitions destroy implicit contracts and allow for the shedding of excess labour. We test this theory using provincial data from the South African gold mining industry, which has been in decline over the...

We develop a model of endogenous skill-biased technical change in developing countries.  The model reconciles wildly dispersed existing estimates of the elasticity of substitution between more and less educated workers.  It also produces an estimating equation for the elasticity, which allow...

Commentators claim that a shortage of skills in South Africa is constraining output and that a rise in skill supply would benefit less skilled occupations. This assumes or implies skilled and unskilled labour are complements. Hicks Elasticities of Complementarity and elasticities of factor price...

This paper investigates the interaction between corruption and infrastructure policy reforms.  I construct a simple model to illustrate how both an incerase in regulatory autonomy and privatisation may influence the effect of corruption.  This interaction is then analysed empirically using a...

This chapter reviews the literature on the theory of relational incentive contracts.  It motivates the discussion by the classic applications of relational contracts to the GM-Fisher Body relationship and the relationships between Japanese automobile manufacturers and their subcontractors.  It...

We consider an observer who makes a finite number of observations of an industry producing a homogeneous good, where each observation consists of the market price and firm specific production quantities.  We develop a revealed preference test (in the form of a linear program) for the hypothesis...

We propose a framework for analyzing transformations of demand. Such transformations frequently stem from changes in the dispersion of consumers` valuations, which lead to rotations of the demand curve. In a wide variety of settings, profits are a U-shaped function of dispersion. A high level of...

This paper analyses the survival of the complete cohort of more than 162,000 limited companies incorporated in Britain in 2001 over the subsequent five-year period.  For this purpose, we estimate firms' hazards of failure and survival functions using nonparametric and semi-parametric...

This paper studies the optimal allocation of coordination responsibilities in organizations where duplication of effort is a serious concern. The planner`s objective is to minimize a weighted average of the wage bill and the cost of delay. The paper provides conditions under which, in balanced...