Electoral competition can have a significant influence on government decisions regarding public spending. In this paper I examine whether the move to multiparty elections in many African countries in the last ten years has been associated with a clear change in priorities for public spending on...

This paper investigates the effect of recent reforms of budgetary institutions in Uganda and Zambia. We argue that cash budgeting has brought clear benefits in terms of improved expenditure control with regard to line ministries. However, contrary to what is often suggested, adoption of a cash...

Delegation and policy rules are frequently suggested strategies for governments to establish credible commitments. Existing literature on rules and delegation in macroeconomic policy has generally avoided the question of why governments that delegate or establish rules do not subsequently...

This paper analyses the effect of limits on fiscal deficits when fiscal policy outcomes depend on automatic stabilizers and when fiscal rules lack perfect credibility. The model developed, which includes interactions between monetary and fiscal policy, provides theoretical support for existing...

Information technology, like the telephone, influences market access; this paper answers the question about a reverse effect, does market access affect information technology, in particular its adoption?  Using the introduction of the telephone in Bavaria, I demonstrate with a rank, order and...

This paper analyses and quantifies the effects of trade liberalisation and skill-biased technical change, both exogenous and trade-induced, on the skill premium and real wages of unskilled and skilled workers in the Mexican manufacturing sector, using industry- and firm-level data for 1984-1990...

We show in an exchange economy with liquidity constraints that the volume of trade and asset prices depend on both the supply of liquidity by the Central Bank and on the liquidity of assets and commodities.  As a result, monetary aggregates are informative for the assessment of economic...

In 1984, the world was shocked at the scale of a famine in Ethiopia that caused over half a million deaths, making it one of the worst in recent history.  The mortality impacts are clearly significant.  But what of the survivors?  This paper provides the first estimates the long-term impact...

This paper shows that Zipf's Law for cities can emerge as a property of a clustering process.  If initially uniformly distributed people chose their location based on a specific gravity equation as found in trade studies, they will form cities that follow Zipf's Law in expected value.  This...

This paper develops a revealed preference methodology for exploring whether time inconsistencies in household choice are the product of nonstationarities at the individual level or the result of individual heterogeneity and renegotiation within the collective unit.  An empirical application to...