This paper examines the effects of remedial mathematics on performance in university-level economics courses using a natural experiment. We study exam results prior and subsequent to the implementation of a remedial mathematics course that was compulsory for a sub-set of students and unavailable...

We offer an alternative to the conventional 'exchange of favours' story for participation in environmental VA's. The model has a variety of unconventional implications and whilst the environmental application is topical it could be used to explain pro-social behaviour in settings as diverse as...

Many countries in the developing world, those undergoing transition from planned to market systems and even those in the industrialised west, experience periods in which a substantial proportion of the workforce suffer wage arrears. We examine the implications for estimates of wage relativities...

Between 1998 and 2003 production increases in Brazil and Vietnam drove down the price of coffee by 73 percent in global markets, triggering the "international coffee crisis". We examine the effect of this exogenous price fall on Colombia's civil war, exploring whether politically-motivated...

In a two-stage public goods experiment, we study the effect that subjects’ possibility of contributing to a public good in the first stage of the game has on the voluntary contributions to the second public good. Our results show that subjects do not follow either the Nash strategy or the...

we characterise fiscal policy in terms of non-linear processes. We find that government spending and taxes can be described as being non-linear trend stationary processes instead of unit roots. A long run equilibrium relationship - a non-linear co-trend - does exist between the two series,...

The following is proven here: let W : X × C ? R, where X is convex, be a continuous and bounded function such that for each y?C, the function W (·,y) : X ? R is concave (resp. strongly concave; resp. Lipschitzian with constant M; resp. monotone; resp. strictly monotone) and let Y?C. If C is...

Holmström’s (1982/99) career concerns model has become an important workhorse for the analysis of agency issues in many fields. The underlying signal jamming argument requires players to use information in a Bayesian way – which may or may not reasonably approximate real-life decision...

Son-preferring parents tend to continue to have babies until a son's birth. After deciding the set of children, the parents with resource constraints may divert family sources from daughters to a son. Thus, the presence of a son, relative to a daughter, have 2 distinct effects on his sister's...

A widely documented empirical regularity in gambling markets is that bets on high probability events (a race won by a ``favourite'') have higer expected returns than bets on low probability events (a ``longshot'' win). Such favourite-longshot (FL) biases however appear to be more severe and...