This paper discusses the main economic and social changes that have affected the well-being of households in Akytubinsk oblast in Kazakhstan and describes the general responses of the households to these changes. The analysis is based on secondary statistical data and on the results of a...

A conceptual model and numerical example are used to show that private property regimes are not necessarily preferable to common property regimes on efficiency grounds when: (1) agents are risk averse; (2) exogenous enforcement of risk sharing schemes is not feasible; and (3) the associated common...

In a standard General Equilibrium framework, we consider an agent strategically using her large volume of trade to influence asset prices to increase her consumption. We show that, as in Sandroni (2000) for the competitive case, if markets are dynamically complete and some general conditions on...

We study how investability, or openness to foreign equity investors, affects firm value in a sample of over 1,400 firms from 26 emerging markets. We find that, on average, investability is associated with a 9% valuation premium (as measured by Tobin's q). However, in firm-fixed effects...

Agricultural land prices in many developed countries rose and then fell dramatically over a relatively short period of time in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Most of the models in the literature that describe the dynamic behaviour of agricultural land prices suggest that these sharp price...

This paper uses UK data to estimate the returns to schooling. We address the endogeneity of schooling by exploiting the experimental nature of two changes in the minimum school leaving age to instrument eduction. The corrected estimates of the return to education indicate the presence of a large...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the ability of parameter instability tests in regressions with 1(1) processes to discriminate between changes in the cointegrating relationship and changes in the marginal distribution of the regressors. Using annual data for the G-7 countries and the...

We study how competitive pressure influences the make-or-buy decision that oligopolistic firms face between producing an intermediate component in-house or purchasing it from a domestic supplier. We model outsourcing as a bilateral relationship in which the supplier undertakes...

Over the past decade the energy and communications markets in Ireland, which were traditionally the preserve of State owned monopolies, have been opened up to competition to some extent, largely as a result of EU legislation. This has resulted in changes in the regulatory environment and the...

We test for contagion between pairs of East Asian equity markets over the period 1990-2007.We develop an econometric methodology that allows us to test for both 'shift'and 'pure' contagion within a unified framework. Using both Hong Kong and Thailand as potential shock sources, we find strong...