The current austerity in the UK public finances is having knock-on effects for the Scottish Government. Public servants in Scotland talk of the ‘scissors of doom’ – of rising demand for public services and falling revenue expenditure. In response to these pressures the...

For forty years area-based initiatives (ABIs) were the primary tool used by UK governments to tackle problems of concentrated deprivation and dereliction. The last decade saw these initiatives end, replaced by new forms of city-wide or region-wide governance: Local Strategic Partnerships in...

This paper extends the now familiar Shapiro-Stiglitz (1984) model of labor market behavior to reconsider the controversial proposition that some forms of innovation have persistent displacement effects. In particular, it finds that when distinctions between random production failures and reduced...

The stylized facts of ultimatum bargaining in the experimental lab are that offers tend to be near an equal split of the surplus and low, near perfect offers are routinely rejected. Bimmore et al (1995) use aspiration-based evolutionary dynamics to model the evolution of fair play in a binary...

We give a Markov chain that converges to its stationary distribution very slowly. It has the form of a Gibbs sampler running on a posterior distribution of a parameter [theta] given data X. Consequences for Gibbs sampling are discussed.

Recently economists have become interested in why people who face social dilemmas in the experimental lab use the seemingly incredible threat of punishment to deter free riding. Three theories with evolutionary microfoundations have been developed to explain punishment. We survey these theories...