This paper examines the economic organization of the trans-Saharan slave trade between the fourteenth and the nineteenth centuries on those routes that moved slaves from Sudanic Africa via entrepôts in the Sahel and Sahara to the Maghrib. The commercial framework of this trade was integrated...

Children’s lives have been transformed over the past century. Family incomes haveincreased, children lead more solitary lives, attitudes to childhood have changed, newproducts have been developed and commercial pressures on children have increased.The importance of these commercial pressures...

One of the key goals of political economy is to understand how in-stitutional arrangements shape policy outcomes. This paper studiesa comparatively neglected aspect of this - the forces that shape het-erogeneous performance of autocracies. The paper develops a simpletheoretical model of...

A review of research evidence suggests that low levels of educationalattainment are crucial in generating and sustaining social exclusion. Testscores at school are the most effective predictor of many adult outcomes.School attendance and soft skills are also important. Reviewing the...

Existing evidence showed that:- local environmental problems are widespread but worse in low-income areas- there is little evidence that wider environmental concerns are less in low-incomecommunities- residents in low-income areas often face different barriers and incentives for action fromthose...

Empirical evidence suggests that the natural-resource curse operates through the behaviorof the political elite, yet there are few models that convincingly illustrate the mechanismat work. I present a model where natural-resource abundance generates power struggles,thereby increasing the...

This paper examines whether and how socio-economic status is associated withchildren’s behavioural development in today’s children. Using a large cohort ofEnglish children born in the early 1990s we find significant social inequalities inseveral dimensions of child behaviour at age 7. We...

The second half of the 1990s has seen substantialchanges in the wealth of Americanhouseholds, primarily owing to movements inthe stock market. From mid-1994 to mid-1997, the aggregate value of household sector equityholdings (including those owned by nonprofits, mutualfunds, and pensions and...

We consider a general equilibrium model with frictions in credit markets used by households. Inour economy, houses provide housing services to consumers and serve as collateral to lower borrowingcost.We show that this amplifies and propagates the effect of monetary policy shocks on...

This paper investigates the role of consumption in the emergence of the motion picture industry in Britain France and the US. A time-lag of at least twelve years between the invention of cinema and the film industry’s take-off suggests that the latter was not mainly technology-driven. In all...