This paper studies how capital-scarce countries should manage volatile resource income.  Existing literature recommends that capital-scarce countries invest domestically, but that volatile resource income should be saved in a foreign sovereign wealth fund.  I reconcile these by combining a...

Climate policy requires that much of the world's reserves of fossil fuels remain unburned.  This paper makes the case for implementing this directly through policy to close the global coal industry.  Coal is singled out because of its high emissions intensity, low rents per unit value, local...

I use a randomised conditional cash transfer program from Indonesia to provide evidence on peer effects in consumption of poor households.  I combine this with consumption visibility data from Indonesia to examine whether peer effects in consumption differ by a good's visibility.  In line with...

We analyse intertemporal poverty in two important dimensions - income and nutrition - in less developed northwest China during 2000-2004.  A generalised recursive selection model is proposed which enables simultaneous estimation of the causes of intertemporal poverty within and between...

Oil prices experienced in early life predict differential adult outcomes across Nigerian ethnic groups.  Our difference-in-difference approach compares members of southern ethnicities to other Nigerians from the same birth cohort.  Greater prices in a southern individual's birth year predict...

We use the Euler equation to put forward a back-on-the-envelope rule for the global carbon tax based on a two-box carbon cycle with temperature lag, and a constant elasticity of marginal damages with respect to GDP.  This tax falls with time impatience and intergenerational inequality aversion...

This paper examines the convergence of payoffs and strategies in Erev and Roth`s model of reinforcement learning. When all players use this rule it eliminates iteratively dominated strategies and in two-person constant-sum games average payoffs converge to the value of the game. Strategies...

This paper uses firm-level data to address the following issues; (i) Have wage differentials increased at the level of the firm? (ii) Are they any patterns in the levels and changes of these differentials? (iii) Do the same factors determine the pay of both low-skilled and high-skilled workers?

The impact of profitability on capital accumulation, neglected in conventional accounts, is confirmed by a cross sectional analysis of the post-war experience of manufacturing in OECD economies and this is consistent with a body of time-series and firm level studies.

Greater labour market flexibility is often advocated as the solution to joblessness. Calls to weaken minimum wage provisions, to make out-of-work benefits less generous and to reduce legislative or bargained restrictions on hiring and firing have the common objective of encouraging those without...