There are diverse ideas about governance around the world, and this paper studies them through the following questions: (a) what does the available evidence tell us about the political and institutional requirements for sustained economic growth? (b) What do we need from the state to secure...

This paper draws on an original dataset collected in Benin which features data at the individual level. We first provide evidence that suggest that husband and wife are not pooling their respective incomes and thus are not making expenditure decisions on the basis of one common budget. As we...

This paper studies indigenous insurance groups using evidence from urban areas in Benin. Many of these informal institutions co-exist within neighbourhood-distance. They are based on well-defined rules and regulations, offering premium-based insurance for funeral expenses, as well as other forms...

In the light of first-hand data from a Beninese urban household survey in Cotonou, we investigate several motives aiming to explain participation in Rotating Savings and Credit Associations (ROSCAs). We provide empirical findings which lead us to think that the main reason why individuals join a...

This paper addresses - with the help of numerical simulation - some of the issues relating to income distribution in the context of development of an economy with an informal sector and migration of both low and high skilled workers from the rural to the urban area. A major aim has been to see...

Adopting a non-probabilistic formulation of the Efficient Markets Hypothesis, this paper looks at its relationship to general equilibrium theory. Shannon's entropy allows us to show that arbitrage-free prices maximise the economy-wide amount of information, thereby bringing the two concepts...

We use personnel data from a Russian firm for the years 1997 to 2002 to study the determinants of wages during transition. Our findings indicate that remuneration is not predetermined by formal rules and a stable institutionalized structure of wages, but rather that local labor market conditions...

Studies of public-private and foreign-domestic wage differentials face difficulties distinguishing ownership effects from correlated characteristics of workers and firms. This paper estimates these ownership differentials using linked employer-employee data (LEED) from Hungary containing 1.35mln...

We extend our 2003 paper on instrumental variables (IV) and GMM estimation and testing and describe enhanced routines that address HAC standard errors, weak instruments, LIML and k-class estimation, tests for endogeneity and RESET and autocorrelation tests for IV estimates.

Possible directions of industrial policy for North Korea are developed in this paper, drawing on the experience of the European transition economies and focusing on privatisation and restructuring, new business formation, and export promotion. North Korea at present is largely closed, and its...