Unemployment in the 1930s was low in France by international standards, nevertheless there was a virulent drive to expel immigrant workers as a means of limiting domestic unemployment. This involved not only the repatriation of the foreign chômeur, but also legislation to displace the foreign...

In a monetary policy model incorporating partial persistence in inflation it is shown that inflation bias is reduced and the response to shocks improved if the policy maker has a discount rate lower than its true social value. Thus a patient central banker is shown to be a third mechanism for...

This paper examines how economic activity and market participation are distributed across space. Applying a non-parametric von Thünen model to Nepalese data, we uncover a strong spatial division of labor. Non-farm employment is heavily concentrated in and around cities while agricultural wage...

The paper extends existing work on inequality and economic development by estimating a cross-country structural model that identifies bi-directional relationships between income inequality and other indicators of social and economic development. Overall, lower inequality is associated with...

China has sought to improve enterprise performance not through privatisation as in other transition economies, but through corporatisation as means of improving corporate governance. Actual governance practices of corporatised Chinese firms are however seriously defective, characterized by...

Why do so many African governments consistently impose high tax rates and make little investment in productive public goods when alternative policies could yield greater tax revenues and higher national income? We posit and test an intertemporal political economy model in which the government...

Ghanaian manufacturing firms face a highly risky environment. Firms may attempt to manage these risks by undertaking production, input, and investment strategies designed to lower profit variability. Mean-variance analysis implies, however, that these strategies involve a trade-off with lower...

It has been argued that Africa will not be able to export manufactures as it lacks the necessary skills. Without an ability to export there will only be an incentive to invest in the sector if domestic demand grows rapidly. Comparative data for four African countries - the Cameroon, Ghana, Kenya...

The paper focuses on a labour market dominated by a public sector where the links between pay and effort are weak, as in many developing countries. This feature is incorporated in an extension of the basic Shapiro-Stiglitz model of shirking in order to explain the coexistence of high wages (in...

This paper develops a formula for the optimal nonlinear income tax, the terms of which are familiar from the theory of linear income taxation. The development uses the idea of a perturbation of the optimal schedule and is based upon as assumption of differentiability. It is also shown that the...