This paper examines the factors contributing to the rise in unemployment in Australia during the depression of the 1930s and to its decline in the subsequent recovery. While previous writers have generally argued that demand side variables were predominant, it has also claimed that excessive...

This paper shows that a monopolistic certifying party can have incentives to disclose revealing information about the agent he is certifying. Using a three-person game-theoretic model and allowing certificate users (buyers) to have noisy estimates of the quality level of the agent being...

This paper proposes a new framework for the impulse-response analysis of business cycle transitions. A cointegrated vector autoregressive Markov-switching model is found to be a congruent representation of post-war US employment and output data. In this model some parameters change according to...

The value of selecting the best forecasting model as the basis for empirical economic policy analysis is questioned. When no model coincides with the data generation process, non-causal statistical devices may provide the best available forecasts: examples from recent work include intercept...

In this paper, we revisit the contested issue of the impact of agricultural extension on farm production. We exploit two features of the data available to us: its longitudinal nature and explicit measures of farmer ability. We find that after controlling for innate productivity characteristics...

Formal models prove the possibility of positive feedback in collective action; the metaphors of historically minded observers convey the same insight. It is still neglected in the literature on social movements, which emphasizes exogenous factorsâ€â€above all, political...

This paper argues that all historical data series should be accompanied by formal estimates of their margins of error. We discuss the nature of errors in data series and review earlier attempts to assess their reliability. We show how overall margins of error may be calculated for historical...

The paper explores some interactions between production environment and health maintenance by workers in developing countries. We argue that rural occupations, being less highly specialized than occupations in urban areas, offer members of rural households a range of productive activities...

I argue that the economy of the early Roman Empire was primarily a market economy. The parts of this economy located far from each other were not tied together as tightly as markets often are today, but they still functioned as part of a comprehensive Mediterranean market. This conclusion is...