India's development experience over the past fifty years suggests that the increasing importance of the services sector deserves analysis.  The literature on structural change has emphasised changing patterns of demand as an explanation for the increasing importance of the services sector.  In...

We propose a new, easy-to-implement, class of payment rules, "Reference Rules", to make core-selecting package auctions more robust.  Small, almost-riskless, profitable deviations from "truthful bidding" are often easy for bidders to find under currently-used payment rules.  Reference Rules...

I discuss models which allow the local level model, which rationalised exponentially weighted moving averages, to have a time-varying signal/noise ratio.  I call this a martingale component model.  This makes the rate of discounting of data local.  I show how to handle such models...

Interconnections among financial institutions create potential channels for contagion and amplification of shocks to the financial system.  We propose precise definitions of these concepts and analyze their magnitude.  Contagion occurs when a shock to the assets of a single firm causes other...

Recent evidence from an exhaustive political-economy study of growth of African economise - the Growth Project of the African Economic Research Consortium (AERC) - suggests that 'policy syndromes' have substantially contributed to the generally poor growth in sub-Saharan Africa during...

We identify necessary and sufficient conditions under which a finite data set of price vectors and consumption bundles can be rationalized by a weakly separable utility function.  Our result could be understood as a generalization of Afriat's Theorem.

This paper analyses characteristics and determinants of the recent explosion of patent filings by Chinese firms both in China and the United States.  We construct a firm-level dataset by matching USPTO and SIPO patents to Chinese manufacturing census data for the period 1999-2006.  Using this...

In many developing countries, the beneficiaries of transfer programmes are determined by community-based processes, based on some general targeting rules related to needs.  This opens the door for local social and political processes to impact on who gets access.  Despite increasingly large...

This paper studies the interaction of incentive pay and social distance in the dissemination of information.  We analyse theoretically as well as empirically the effect of incentive pay when agents have pro-social objectives, but also preferences over dealing with one social group relative to...

We consider forecasting with factors, variables and both, modeling in-sample using Autometrics so all principal components and variables can be included jointly, while tackling multiple breaks by impulse-indicator saturation.  A forecast-error taxonomy for factor models highlights the impacts...