This paper explains the multiple adoption of agriculture around ten thousand years ago, in spite of the fact that the …first farmers suffered worse health and nutrition than their hunter gatherer predecessors. If output is harder for farmers to defend, adoption may entail increased defense...

Abstract This paper is concerned with the geography of structural change in Great Britain since 1971. It divides the country into two broad areas—the ‘North’ comprising Northern England, the West Midlands, Wales and Scotland, and the ‘South’ comprising the rest of mainland Britain. The...

This paper is concerned with the geography of structural change in Great Britain since 1971. It divides the country into two broad areas - the 'North' comprising Northern England, the West Midlands, Wales and Scotland, and the 'South' comprising the rest of mainland Britain.

This paper defines de-industrialisation as a secular decline in the share of manufacturing in national employment. De-industrialisation, in this sense, has been a widespread feature of economic growth in advanced economies in recent decades. The paper considers briefly what explains this...

Deindustrialization has eliminated many traditionally male jobs in Great Britain. Using geographical comparisons based on Census data, this paper estimates that the resulting fall in male employment explains between 38% and 59% of the 1.16m increase in lone parent families over the period...

This article examines the determinants of steady state trust in a population of principals and agents, where the former learn from experience using boundedly rational procedures. For any distribution of agent types, the long-run distribution of principal behaviour is characterised. Heterogeneity...

This paper examines the role of marriage as an institution for providing couples with the confidence to make long-term investments in their relationship. No-fault divorce has undermined the notion of marriage as a contract, thereby reducing the security offered by marriage and promoting...

This paper criticizes the current enthusiasm for labour market policies as the main route to employment creation in OECD countries. Such policies are normally seen as a means of encouraging more employment on existing capital stock. This approach is one-sided and downplays the equally important...

This paper fully characterizes the optimal control of a recurrent infectious disease through the use of (non-vaccine) prevention and treatment. The dynamic system may admit multiple steady states and the optimal policy may be path dependent. We find that an optimal path cannot end at a point...