Income mobility is often thought to equalize permanent incomes and thereby to improvesocial welfare. The welfare analysis of mobility often fails, however, to account for the cost ofthe variability of periodic incomes around permanent incomes. This paper assesses the netwelfare benefit of...

The optimal design of low income support is examined using a structural labour supplymodel. The approach incorporates unobserved heterogeneity, fixed costs of work, childcarecosts and the detailed non-convexities of the tax and transfer system. The analysis considerspurely Pareto improving...

The paper argues that networked firms are likely to have an advantage in securing externalfinance in countries with weak legal and judicial institutions since it helps financial institutionsto minimize the underlying agency costs of lending. An analysis of recent BEEPS data fromfifteen Central...

To date, empirical investigations of trade liberalization under the conditions of increasingreturns to scale (IRS) and imperfect competition (IC) have either assumed or imposed themarket and productive structures necessary for such a model. However, of the recent IRS/ICmodels used to simulate...

The “Great Recession” resulted in many business closings and foreclosures, but what effectdid it have on business formation? On the one hand, recessions decrease potential businessincome and wealth, but on the other hand they restrict opportunities in the wage/salary sectorleaving the net...

We discuss how the use of field experiments sheds light on long standing research questionsrelating to firm behavior. We present insights from two classes of experiments: within andacross firms, and draw common lessons from both sets. Field experiments within firmsgenerally aim to shed light on...

We study how workers’ wages respond to TFP-driven innovations in firms’ labor productivity.Using unique data with highly reliable firm-level output prices and quantities in themanufacturing sector in Sweden, we are able to derive measures of physical (as opposed torevenue) TFP to instrument...

We provide the first econometric study of efficiency for a member of the Mondragon group ofworker cooperatives. Eroski is a retail distribution chain and, most unusually, there are twodistinct types of hypermarkets: (i) cooperatives with significant employee ownership andvoice; and (ii) GESPAs...

Flexicurity labour markets are characterised by flexible hiring/firing rules, generous socialsafety net, and active labour market policies. How can such labour markets cope with theconsequences of the Great Recession? Larger labour shedding is to be expected and thisstrains the social safety net...

There is a well-established positive correlation between life-satisfaction measures andincome in individual level cross-sectional data. This paper attempts to provide some evidenceon whether this correlation reflects causality running from money to happiness. I use industrywage differentials as...