How do social contracts come into being?  This paper argues that norm adoption plays an important and neglected role in this process.  Using novel data from urban Nigeria, we examine why individuals adopt norms favoring a citizen obligation to pay tax where state enforcement is weak.  We find...

In the late 19th century Britain accumulated substantial overseas assets.  It has been generally accepted that overseas investment displaced domestic investment.  This paper questions this assumption by pointing to the rise in the savings ratio, which enabled high capital exports to be...

Modern economic growth first emerged in Britain about the time of the Industrial Revolution, with its cotton textile factories, urban industrialization and export orientated industrialization.  A period of economic growth, industrial diversification and export orientation preceded the...

It is of considerable interest to forecast future mesothelioma mortality.  No measures for exposure are available so it is not straight forward to apply a dose-response model.  It is proposed to model the counts of deaths directly using a Poisson regression with an age-period-cohort structure,...

This article responds to Professor Jane Humphries' critique of my assessment of the high wage economy of eighteenth century Britain and its importance for explaining the Industrial Revolution.  New Evidence is presented to show that women and children participated in the high wage economy.  It...

Using the gradual roll out of a large rural workfare program in India, we estimate its effect on private employment and wages by comparing districts that received the program earlier relative to those that received it later.  Our results suggest that public sector hiring crowds out private...

In 2009, Horrell, Meredith and Oxley used trends in body mass to argue that poor London women in the later 19th century suffered declining access to household resources over their lifetimes.  The authors evaluated competing models of household behaviour, rejected the unitary model of equal...

We use the rapid expansion of the number of mineral mines in Sub- Saharan Africa to explore changes in local labor markets. Matching over two decades of panel data on industrial mines to survey data for half a million women and exploiting the spatial and temporal variation in the data in a...

We examine the determinants of time allocation and child labour in a year-long panel of time-use data from colonial Nigeria.  Using quantitative and ethnographic approaches, we show that health shocks imposed time costs on individuals.  Whether individuals could recruit substitutes depended on...

This paper extends the relational contract model in Levin (2003) with shocks to theagent’s cost of effort (agent’s type) to shocks to the principal’s valuation of the agent’seffort (principal’s type). When optimal effort is fully pooled across agent types...