This study evaluates the effectiveness of contracting out mandatory publicly provided counselling and training for long-term unemployed in Flanders (Belgium) to private for-profit and non-profit organisations (FPOs and NPOs). A multivariate transition model exploits timing-of-events and novel...

This chapter looks at the UK s privatisation experiment, which began from the late 1970s. It considers the background to the UK s privatisations, which industries were privatised and how, and summarises the results of studies of performance changes in privatised companies in the UK. It looks at...

Edwards and Ogilvie (2008) dispute the empirical basis for the view (Greif, e.g., 1989, 1994, 2006) that multilateral reputation mechanism mitigated agency problems among the eleventh-century Maghribi traders. They assert that the relations among merchants and agents were law-based. This paper...

What has driven trade booms and trade busts in the past and present? We derive a micro-founded measure of trade frictions from leading trade theories and use it to gauge the importance of bilateral trade costs in determining international trade flows. We construct a new balanced sample of...

We propose a normative assessment of the value of international trade that is rooted in production theory and embeds Ricardo's 1817 formulation of the gains from trade into a multi-factor general equilibrium framework. Without imposing strong assumptions on consumer rationality or data from the...

We present new data documenting medieval Europeś "Commercial Revolution" using information on the establishment of markets in Germany. We use these data to test whether medieval universities played a causal role in expanding economic activity, examining the foundation of Germanyś first...

This paper reviews changes in global, between-country and within-country inequality over 1980-2000 against the background of the shifts that occurred in this area during the globalisation of 1870-1914. The paper finds that recent changes in global and between-country inequality are not marked...