This paper explores one of the ways in which acceptance of the hypothesis that labor market transactions involve arrangements for shifting risk from workers to employers strengthens the case for accepting the hypothesis that incomplete information is the critical factor in producing the positive...

Between 1946 and 1976, the European powers granted independence to all of their large colonies in Africa and Southeast Asia. This paper attempts to provide an economic explanation for this remarkable ending to the era of colonialism. The main theoretical innovation is to consider the effect of...

History suggests the following stylized facts about default on sovereign debt:(1) Defaults are associated with identifiably bad states of the world. (2) Defaults are usually partial, rather than complete.(3) Sovereign states usually are able to borrow again soon after a default. Motivated by...

This paper shows that whether or not a sovereign can borrow to smooth consump- tion depends both on how consumption smoothing is achieved, whether by contingent debt issuance or by contingent debt servicing, and on the penalty for debt repudiation. If a sovereign that repudiated its debt could...

This paper offers an explanation for observed differences across countries in educational policies and in resulting interpersonal distributions of human capital. We analyse a general-equilibrium model in which, as a result of the apportionment of natural ability, nurturing, and publicly financed...

This paper develops an analytical framework for studying colonial investment from the perspective of neoclassical political economy. The distinguishing feature of colonial investment in this model is that the metropolitan government restricts the amount of investment in the colony in order to...

Traditionally, general-equilibrium models have taken effective property rights to be given and have been concerned only with analysing the allocation of resources among productive uses and the distribution of the resulting product. But, this formulation of the economic problem is incomplete...