Pupils from poorer background are commonly observed to have lower schooling than other pupils. However, the effect of family income on the child’s educational attainment is unclear. The effect could be direct and due to financial constraints preventing parental investment in their children’s...

In most sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries there is a strong connection between tradables recovery and the alleviation of rural poverty through higher farm incomes, agricultural wages, rural multiplier effects and inter-sectoral linkages. Liberalisation policies, as elaborated in the Berg...

Improving the quality of state-funded secondary school education has become a major issue in the UK. However, without a valuation of the social benefits derived from public provision of educational services, the rational evaluation of policy to this end is difficult. Utilising the argument that...

In this paper we show how the size of innovation can affect the incentive for cooperative R&D and social welfare. When cost difference between large and small innovations is not sufficiently large then social welfare can be more under small innovation compared to large innovation. However, the...

This paper examines how the presence of network externalities affects a monopolist’s incentive for quality degradation and its welfare consequence. The software and the Internet service industries provide our primary motivation. The network externality may lead to a Pareto-improving quality...

In an oligopoly industry of k firms (k 2) with linear demand and identical (constant) average cost of production, a bilateral merger is never profitable when all firms choose their quantities simultaneously. In this paper we reexamine the issue when some firms have first-mover advantage. We...