A seller wishes to prevent the discovery of rival offers by its prospective customers.  We study sales techniques which serve this purpose by making it harder for a customer to return to buy later after a search for alternatives.  These include making an exploding offer, offering a "buy-now"...

This paper uses novel data on trade mark activity of UK manufacturing and service sector firms to investigate whether trade marks improve the profitability and productivity of firms. We first analyse Tobin`s q, the ratio of stock market value to book value of tangible assets. We then investigate...

For some observers, the dramatic growth of the services sector in India reflects rapid strides made by educated professionals.  Some others see it as the expansion of an employer of last resort.  Given this heterogeneity, the object of the paper is to analyze the nature of employment being...

I analyze empirically the effects of both urban and industrial agglomeration on men`s and women`s search behavior and on the efficiency of matching. The analysis is based on the Italian Labor Force Survey micro-data, which covers 520 randomly drawn Local Labor Market Areas (66 per cent of the...

Little is known about the extent and forces of urban path dependence in developing countries.  Railroad construction in colonial Kenya provides a natural experiment to study the emergence and persistence of this spatial equilibrium.  Using new data at a fine spatial level over one century...

Agriculture is the largest sector in most sub-Saharan economies in terms of employment, and it plays an important role in supplying food and export earnings.  Rural poverty rates remain high, and labor productivity is strikingly low.  This paper asks how these factors shape the role of...

We report on a randomized field experiment using price incentives to address both economic and gender inequality in land tenure formalization.  During the 1990s and 2000s, nearly two dozen African countries proposed de jure land reforms extending access to formal, freehold land tenure to...

We develop a new methodology for quantifying the tasks undertaken within occupations using 3,000 verbs from around 12,000 occupational descriptions in the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOTs).  Using micro-data from the United States from 1880-2000, we find an increase in the employment...

Do locational fundamentals such as coastlines and rivers determine town locations, or can historical events trap towns in unfavorable locations for centuries?  We examine the effects on town locations of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, which temporarily ended urbanization in Britain,...

We use survey data to investigate how urban households in Ethiopia coped with the food price shock in 2008 and idiosyncratic shocks.  Qualitative data indicate that the high food price inflation was by far the most adverse economic shock between 2004 and 2008, and that a significant proportion...