The paper reviews the macroeconomic data describing the British economy during theindustrial revolution and shows that they contain a story of dramatically increasing inequalitybetween 1800 and 1840: GDP per worker rose 37%, real wages stagnated, and the profit ratedoubled. They share of profits...

I analyze empirically the effects of both urban and industrial agglomeration on men’s andwomen’s search behavior and on the efficiency of matching. The analysis is based on the ItalianLabor Force Survey micro-data, which covers 520 randomly drawn Local Labor Market Areas(66 per cent of the...

We present a general Cournot model in which each ¯rm may sell multiplequality-di®erentiated products. We use an upgrades approach, working not with theactual products, but instead with upgrades from one quality to the next. The prop-erties of single-product Cournot models carry over to the...

We investigate determinants of launch spreads in European securitizationtransactions over the last decade. First, we develop a simple, reduced-form pricingmodel for all issues across different transaction types and test it. We document thecritical importance of credit ratings without refinements...

Securitisations usually involve creating multiple tranches of a single issue with different characteristics, placed on the market as separate securities. Various theoretical explanations have been advanced to explain such tranching. This paper provides the first systematic testing of such...

List prices are not completely credible as take it or leave it prices: buyers are able to seek reductions by bargaining with firms. We show that this realisation leads to the existence of a critical threshold number of competitors in an industry which depends on fundamentals. In industries with...

In China urban residents have traditionally been protected against labour marketcompetition from rural-urban migrants. Over the period of urban economic reform, rural-urbanmigration was allowed to increase in order to fill the employment gap as growth of labourdemand outstripped that of the...

Using data from the Philippines, this paper seeks to understand how households in thestudy area apparently manage to avoid falling in a debt trap in spite of frequent borrowing.Findings suggest this is achieved via three institutional features. First, most informal debtcarries no interest. As we...

This paper analyses how competition over rebates for customer loyalty across product lines affects firms` pricing and consumers generally. If buyers incur firm specific costs or have shop specific tastes then competitive loyalty discounts lower consumer surplus overall and raise profits - the...

This paper considers the impact of reviewers on sales of products of quality unknown to consumers. Sales occur simultaneously after consideration by a reviewer with a known level of bias. Consumers observe the reviewer`s decision and a private signal. We find that: (a) with flexible prices and...