Tenured public officials such as judges are often thought to be indifferent to the concerns of the elctorate and, as a result, potentially lacking in discipline but unlikely to pander to public opinion.  We investigate this proposition empirically using data on promotion decisions taken by...

This paper demonstrates that inertia driven by switching costs leads to more rapid evolution in a class of games that includes m x m pure coordination games. Under the best-response dynamic and a fixed rate of mutation, the expected waiting time to reach long-run equilibrium is of lower order in...

Estimates are produced for differences between the ceteris paribus earnings of union and non-union workers in the UK and the US over time.

While it might be expected that schooling will depend positively on the economic returns to education (ER) in the local labor market, in fact there is theoretical ambiguity about the sign of the schooling-ER relationship when households are liquidity-constrained. Whether the relationship is...

This paper analyzes optimal wage contracting assuming agents are not subjective expected utility maximizers but are, instead, ambiguity (or uncertainty) averse decision makers who maximize Choquet expected utility. We show that such agents will choose not to include any indexation coverage in...

The paper compares the standard of living of labourers in the Roman Empire in 301 AD with the standard of living of labourers in Europe and Asia from the middle ages to the industrial revolution. Roman data are drawn from Diocletian`s Price Edict. The real wage of Roman workers was like that of...

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...

Increasing wage inequality is a feature of many economies in recent years, and the same is true of China. Whereas in most countries it is normally interpreted as a move from one market equilibrium to another, in China it is more likely to reflect a move away from extreme disequilibirum. Two...

The massive transition to higher education and the large number of university graduates taking school-leavers` jobs has led many to question the widely held view that a university education is a good investment and a guarantee of economic success. This paper using data from one large civic...

We analyze empirically the impact of urban agglomeration on Italian wages. Using micro-data from the Bank of Italy`s Survey of Household Income and Wealth for the years 1995, 1998, 2000 and 2002 on more than 22,000 employees distributed to 242 randomly drawn local labor markets (30 percent of...