A seller wishes to prevent the discovery of rival offers by its prospective customers.  We study sales techniques which serve this purpose by making it harder for a customer to return to buy later after a search for alternatives.  These include making an exploding offer, offering a "buy-now"...

Theory suggests that government should as far as possible smooth taxes and its recurrent consumption spending, which means that government debts should act as a shock absorber, and any planned adjustments in debt should be gradual.  This suggests that operational targets for governments (e.g....

Bad ethics can make for bad economic outcome.  Bad ethics are defined hedonically as the infliction of pain on others for private advantage.  The infliction of pain is often justified by 'Just World Theories', which state that everyone gets what they deserve.  Market liberalism (and its...

This paper estimates a New Keynesian model to investigate to what extent labour market reforms undertaken by the Thatcher government in the late 1930s and the introduction of a constant inflation target in 1992 might have changed the UK economic outlook if they had been introduced in the early...

We investigate whether the set of available enforcement mechanisms affects the formation of risk sharing relations by applying dyadic regression analysis to data from a specifically designed behavioural experiment, two surveys and a genealogical mapping exercise.  During the experiment...

Adam Smith rejected Mandeville's invisible-hand doctrine of 'private vices, public benefits'.  In The Theory of Moral Sentiments his model of the 'impartial spectator' is driven not by sympathy for other people, but by their approbation.  Approbation needs to be authenticated, and in Smith's...

We document empirical patterns of correlation in the adoption of technological innovation and contractual practices among manufacturing firms in Ethiopia and Sudan.  The analysis is based on network data indicating whether any two firms in our sample do business with each other, whether they...

The article aims to present and discuss estimates of levels of human and social capital in Italy's regions over the long term, i.e. roughly from the second half of the nineteenth century up to the present day.  The results are linked to newly available evidence for regional value added in order...

Some scholars have posited that mutual banks have fewer incentives to engage in excessive risk-taking than joint-stock banks because of the unique structure of property rights in the mutual firm.  This paper uses their theory as a framework to explain the divergent risk-taking behavior of...

I examine the effect of labor income taxation in life-cycle models where work experience builds human capital.  In this case, the wage no longer equals the opportunity cost of time - which is, instead, the wage plus returns to work experience.  This has a number of interesting consequences. ...