Schooling is typically found to be highly correlated with individual earnings in African countries.  However, African firm or sector level studies have failed to identify a similarly strong effect for average worker schooling levels on productivity.  This has been interpreted as evidence that...

Many recent descriptive studies find convex schooling-earnings profiles in developing countries.  In these countries forward-looking students should attach option values to completing lower levels of schooling.  Another option value may arise due to the uncertain economic environment in which...

Empirical work in labour economics has focused on rent sharing as an explanation for the observed correlation in cross-sections between wages and profitability. The alternative explanation of risk sharing between workers and employers has not been tested. Using a unique panel data set for four...

Macro policy has changed the real exchange rates for African countries dramatically in the 1990s. In this paper the possible impact of macroeconomic policy on firms in the manufacturing sector is considered based on a panel survey of such firms in Cameroon. Kenya, Ghana and Zimbabwe. The data...

This article examines the contractual practices of African manufacturing firms using survey data collected in Burundi, Cameroon, Cote d'lvoire, Kenya, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Descriptive statistics and econometric results are presented. They show that contractual flexibility is pervasive and that...

Despite the widely recognised importance of the manufacturing industry for successful development few studies investigate this sector in cross-country analysis. We fill this gap in the literature by analysing manufacturing production across a large number of developing and developed economies....

The Cross-country growth literature commonly uses aggregate economy datasets such as the Penn World Table (PWT) to estimate homogeneous production function or convergence regression models.  Against the background of a dual economy framework this paper investigates the potential bias arising...

Since the seminal contribution of Gregory Mankiw, David Romer and David Weil (1992), the growth empirics literature has used increasingly sophisticated methods to select relevant growth determinants in estimating cross-section regressions.  The vast majority of empirical approaches however...