This paper uses the introduction of the national minimum wage in the UK in April 1999 as a 'natural experiment' to analyse the impact of minimum wages on enrolment in schooling.  At the time of its introduction, only workers aged 18 years or more were covered by the legislation.  The paper...

The existing literature on training is concerned with understanding the reasons why firms pay for the general skills of their workers, but without explaining which firms train which workers. This paper develops a theory that both explains the willingness of firms to pay for general training, and...

An increasingly important organisational design problem for many firms is to recoup general human capital rents while maintaining attractive career prospects for workers. We explore the role of information management in this context. In our model, an information management policy determines the...

Does emigration really drain human capital accumulation in origin countries? This paper explores a unique household survey designed and conducted to answer this specific question for the case of Cape Verde - the sub-Saharan African country with the largest fraction of tertiary-educated...

Productivity advances drive long-run economic growth, and a crucial factor is labour productivity improvements.  The productivity of labour in China was marginally relevant in the pre-1978 period, but the picture has changed dramatically in the reform period due to numerous labour market...

Population aging and the burden it imposes on state finances is one of the major economic challenges governments around the world face. Responses are formulated in terms of either increasing employment (for example by raising the retirement age) or increasing productivity (investment in...

We examine the shareholder wealth effects of takeover defenses by developing a model in which takeovers facilitate the implementation of technological innovations. In the rational expectations equilibrium of the model with explicit contracts, we show that takeover defenses are deployed to insure...

In human capital intensive industries where it is difficult to contract upon the training effort of skilled agents a socially suboptimal level of training may occur. We show how partnership organisations can overcome this problem by tying human and financial capital. Partnerships are opaque so...

Until 1970, the New York Stock Exchange prohibited public incorporation of member firms. After the rules were relaxed to allow joint stock firm membership, investment-banking concerns organized as partnerships or closely-held private corporations went public in waves, with Goldman Sachs (1999)...

Jewish emancipation in nineteenth century Europe produced drastically different responses.  In Germany, a liberal variant known as Reform developed, while ultra-Orthodox Judaism emerged in eastern Europe.  We develop a model of religious organization which explains this polarization.  In...