We analyse the costs of a monetary union in West Africa by means of asymmetric aggegate demand and aggregate supply shocks. Previous studies have estimated the shocks with the VAR model. We discuss the limits of this approach and apply a new technique based on the dynamic factor model. The...

We show that relaxing the assumption of CES preferences in monopolistic competition has surprising implications when trade is restricted.  Integrated and segmented markets behave differently, the latter typically exhibiting reciprocal dumping.  Globalization and lower trade costs have...

We introduce two new tools for relating preferences and demand to firm behavior and economic performance.  The "Demand Manifold" links the elasticity and convexity of an arbitrary demand function; the "Utility Manifold" links the elasticity and concavity of an arbitrary utility function. ...

We provide a general characterization of which firms will select alternative ways of serving a market.  If and only if firms' maximum profits are supermodular in production and market-access costs, more efficient firms will select into the activity with lower market-access costs.  Our result...

We show that the efficient allocation of production capacity can turn a competitive industry and downstream market into an imperfectly competitive one. Even though downstream firms have symmetric production technologies, the downstream industry structure will be symmmetric only if capacity is...

Around 40% of the male workforce regularly works 8 to 9 hours a week of paid overtime. This paper investigates the determinants of overtime hours in Britain over the period 1975-1999. For this purpose a panel data Tobit model is estimated using the very large panel of employees from the National...

The UK`s Equal Opportunities Commission has recently drawn attention to the `hidden brain drain` when women working part-time are employed in occupations below those for which they are qualified. These inferences were based on self-reporting. We give an objective and quantitative analysis of the...

The empirical results show that changes in the job-mix across the economy, from high to low overtime jobs rather than within-job changes in the use of overtime, account for most of the apparent decline in the extent of overtime working over the 1990s. Within jobs, the GDP cycle has a significant...

Almost half the women in work in the UK work part-time, but views conflict: does this support a woman`s career or is it a dead-end trap? Cohort data on labour market involvement to age 42 show highly varied pathways through full/part-time/non-employment. Econometric estimation confirms that...

Part-time work has been a major area of employment growth for women in the UK over recent decades. Almost half the women in employment now work part-time and two-thirds have worked part-time for some part of their working lives. Part-time employment is welcomed by many women as a means of...