Between the 1870s and World War II, falls in world shipping costs and Western industrialisation gave rise to export-led Southeast Asian growth and specialization in a narrow range of primary commodity exports.  A linked development was the emergence of a few dominant Southeast Asian urban...

This report considers alternative exchange rate arrangements for EAC countries in the transition to a monetary union.  Four main considerations shape our analysis.  First, while existing exchange rate policies differ in some important ways across the EAC, the Partner States have expressed a...

The newly dominant interpretation of the British industrial revolution contends that Britain was a high wage economy (HWE) and that the high wages themselves caused industrialization by making profitable labour-saving inventions that were economically inefficient in the context of other relative...

Banking in the UK was stable for more than a century after 1866.  Financial institutions were differentiated according to function.  The core banks did not engage in maturity transformation, but in managing a payments system for business.  Real estate was a potential source of instability due...

The theoretical literature on (non-random) choice largely follows the route of Richter (1966) by working in abstract environments and by stipulating that we see all choices of an agent from a given feasible set.  On the other hand, empirical work on consumption choice using revealed preference...

Panel data on 54 developing countries between 1960 and 2000 are used to investigate how the impact of opening to trade on economic growth is affected by wealth inequality.  The results suggest (a) that opening to trade tends to accelerate growth but (b) that the addition to growth depends...

Using village data from Tanzania, we test whether gifts and loans between households are voluntary while correcting for mis-reporting by the giving and receiving households.  Two maintained assumptions underlie our analysis: answers to a question on who people would turn to for help are good...

In this paper we explore whether low rates of sustained technology use can be explained by heterogeneity in returns to adoption.  To do so we evaluate impacts of the Cocoa Abrabopa Association, which provided a package of fertilizer and other inputs on credit to cocoa farmers in Ghana.  High...

We evaluate automatically selecting the relevant variables in an econometric model from a large candidate set.  General-to-specific selection is outlined for a constant model in orthogonal variables, where only one decision is required to select, irrespective of the number of regressors (N T)...

The class of Functional Signal plus Noise (FSN) models is introduced that provides a new, general method for modelling and forecasting time series of economic functions.  The underlying, continuous economic function (or 'signal') is a natural cubic spline whose dynamic evolution is driven by a...