We present an overview of models of long-term self-enforcing labour contracts in which risk sharing is the dominant motive for contractual solutions. A base model is developed which is sufficiently general to encompass the two-agent problem central to most of the literature, including variable...

This paper analyses a model of private unemployment insurance under limited commitment and a model of public unemployment insurance subject to moral hazard in an economy with a continuum of agents and an infinite time horizon. The dynamic and steady-state properties of the private unemployment...

This paper considers a long-term relationship between two agents who undertake costly actions or investments which produce a joint benefit. Agents have an opportunity to expropriate some of the joint benefit for their own use. The question asked is how to structure the investments and division...

This paper considers a simple stochastic model of international trade with three countries. Two of the tree countries are in an economic union. Comparisons are made between equilibrium welfare for these two countries under fixed and flexible exchange rate regimes. Within the model it is shown...

This paper reports on available bibliometric evidence on the performance of UK research in economics. It examines some standard and non-standard sources of bibliometric evidence and in particular evidence from the ISI and EconLit databases and the Repository of Papers in Economics (RePEc). It...

Trust is measured using both survey questions and a standard trust experiment among a random sample of Muslim and Hindu household heads in rural Bangladesh. We found no significant effect of the social distance between Hindus and Muslims in the trust experiment in terms of fractions sent or...

This paper considers an equilibrium search model with on-the-job search where firms set wages.We look at optimal employment contracts when workers are heterogeneous and choose search intensity. Firms may want to retain their good workers by matching any offers that these employees may receive...

Although policymakers and commentators have repeatedly stressed the impact of uncertainty about the true state of the economy on the setting of interest rates, the academic literature has largely ignored this issue. This paper provides a theoretical analysis of how uncertainty about the true...

We empirically model the growth of the Italian government on a long historical dataset, starting from the country's unification. Our findings point to the existence of a long-run equilibrium relationship between gross domestic product and government spending, that is robust to different...

This paper reports on the construction of an International Water Poverty Index, part of the first phase of a research project into building a locally based version of the index. The purpose of the Water Poverty Index is to express an interdisciplinary measure which links household welfare with...