We model corporate governance in a world with competitive securities markets as well as markets for corporate assets.  We show that varying the liquidity and opacity of corporate assets, the vitality of the market for corporate control, and the costs of enforcing shareholder rights to cash...

In this paper I build an equilibrium search model of the urban Tanzanian labour market that explains the choice between wage and self-employment and the variation in earnings across and within these sectors.  Self-employment is very common in urban Tanzania and survey data show both that there...

How much does public capital matter for economic growth? How large should it be? This paper attempts to answer these questions, taking the case of SSA countries. It develops and estimates a model that posits a nonlinear relationship between public investment and growth, to determine the...

Friedman (1968) - his famous Presidential Address to the American Economic Association - contains an elementary error right at the heart of what is usually supposed to be the paper's crucial argument.  That is the argument to the effect that during an inflation, changing expectations shift in...

In this paper, we consider the identification problem arising in the age-period-cohort models, as well as in the extended chain ladder model.  We propose a canonical parametrization based on the accelerations of the trends in the three factors.  This parametrization is exactly identified.  It...

This paper examines the relationship between norm enforcement and in-group favouritism behaviour.  Using a new two-stage allocation experiment with punishments, we investigate whether in-group favouritism is considered as a social norm in itself or as a violation of a different norm, such as...

Social norms are patterns of behavior that are self-enforcing at the group level: everyone wants to conform when they expect everyone else to conform.  There are multiple mechanisms that sustain social norms, including a desire to coordinate, fear of being sanctioned, signaling membership in...

This paper shows that income shocks to rural households have permanent effects on the eductional attainment of 7-15 year old children within the household.  Using a 13 year panel survey of households in rural Tanzania, I find that idiosyncratic crop shocks such as pests, theft and fire cause...

The classical Chow (1960) test for structural instability requires strictly exogenous regressors and a break-point specified in advance.  In this paper we consider two generalisations, the 1-step recursive Chow test (based on the sequence of studentized recursive residuals) and its supremum...

Climate change must deal with two market failures, global warming and learning by doing in renewable use. The social optimum requires an aggressive renewables subsidy in the near term and a gradually rising carbon tax which falls in long run. As a result, more renewables are used relative to...