The widespread ennoblement of the Spanish bourgeoisie in the sixteenth century has been traditionally considered one of the main causes of Iberian decline. I document and quantify the surge in ennoblement through a new time series of nobility cases preserved in the Archive of the Royal Chancery...

Recent empirical evidence, from countries in the European Union in particular, are much more ambiguous on the costs savings from private production of local public services than previous literature used to be. In this paper, an explanatory model of factors driving costs in solid waste collection...

New Zealand is unusual in that nearly 60% of local services are funded from property taxes. These are a mixture of land taxes, capital value taxes, annual rental value taxes and uniform general charges. We explore the efficiency and equity of this system at both national and local levels. We...

On 28 August 1998 the Treasurer referred the impact of competition policy reforms on rural an regional Australia for inquiry and report within 12 months of receiving the reference. The Commission is to assess the impact (both transitional and ongoing) of the competition policy and related...

This paper proposes a new test to distinguish between the two leading theories of discrimination: preference versus information. Discrimination based on preferences occurs when people behave as if they refuse to change their stereotypes about the capabilities of discriminated individuals. Those...

Are certain groups of unemployed individuals hurt less by unemployment than others? This paper is an attempt to test the hypothesis that non- pecuniary costs of unemployment may vary between societies with different unemployment rates. Using cross-sectional data from the SALDRU93 survey, we show...

The paper provides three principal results. First, we benchmark South African infrastructure performance in terms of access, pricing, and quality against key comparator groups of countries using the most recent World Bank benchmarking data base (2005). Second, we establish clear empirical links...

Are happiness patterns structurally the same when comparing poor and rich countries? Using cross-sectional data from the SALDRU93 survey, we show that the relationships between subjective well-being and socioeconomic variables have a similar structure and is U-shaped in age in South Africa as in...

This paper is the first of its kind to study quality of life responses of crime victims. Using cross-sectional data from the OHS97 survey of South Africa, we show that victims report significantly lower well-being than the non-victims, ceteris paribus. Happiness is lower for nonvictimized...

This is a brief and largely descriptive summary of migration flows in and out of Lesotho, and trends therein over tha last forty years. It includes some explanatory discussion and some speculation about likely future trends.