There has been extensive discussion of the workings of the English system of higher education income contingent student loans.  Major focuses have been on what former students are likely to pay and when, distributional characteristics and how much the Government guarantees made to students...

This study estimates agency's impact on the efficiency of sugar plantations on St. Vincent and the Grenadines during the early 19th century.  Using a panel data set covering the years 1814-1829, a series of stochastic frontier models are estimated to investigate whether estates employing agents...

In this paper, we re-examine two important aspects of the dynamics of rel- ative primary commodity prices, namely the secular trend and the short run volatility. To do so, we employ 25 series, some of them starting as far back as 1650 and powerful panel data stationarity tests that allow for...

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...

We test whether early-life war exposure influences later-life political engagement in Africa.  We combine data on the location and intensity of conflicts since 1954 with nationally representative data on political attitudes and behaviors from 17 sub-Saharan African countries.  Exposure from...

The recent wave of randomized trials in development economics has provoked criticisms regarding external validity.  We investigate two concerns - heterogeneity across beneficiaries and implementers - in a randomized trial of contract teachers in Kenyan schools.  The intervention, previously...

The paper examines the behavior of the British economy 1890-1913 by using a newly assembled quarterly data set.  This provides a basis for estimating a small macroeconomic model, which can be used to explore the relationship between the policy responses of the Bank of England and the course of...

At the beginning of the First World War, the British imposed a blockade against Germany intending to prevent all imports from entering the country.  Germans began to call the British naval action the Hungerblockade, claiming that it seriously damaged the well-being of those on the home front,...

Global frailty is an unobserved macroeconomic variable.  In event data contexts, this unobserved variable is assumed to impact the hazard rate of event arrivals.  Attempts to identify and estimate the path of frailty are complicated when observed macroeconomic variables also impact hazard...

In many African countries a market for private provision of formal sector mass housing is largely absent.  This is not inevitable, but is the consequence of policy failure surrounding five key issues.  The affordability of housing, with costs often inflated by inappropriate building...