This paper investigates relational incentive contracts with a continuum of privately observedagent types that are persistent over time. For a sufficiently productive relationship,a pooling contract exists in which all agent types continuing the relationshipchoose the same action. Necessary and...

Trygve Haavelmo's Probability Approach aimed to implement economic theories, but he later recognized their incompleteness. Although he did not explicitly consider model selection, we apply it when theory-relevant variables, {xt}, are retained without selection while selecting other candidate...

This paper studies the consequences of a regulatory pay cap in proportion to assets onbank risk, bank value, and bank asset allocations. The cap is shown to lower banks' riskand raise banks' values by acting against a competitive externality in the labour market.The risk reduction is achieved...

I develop and test two competing models assessing the impacts of targeted government transferson a local incumbent's electoral performance. I take advantage of the randomized roll-out of alarge-scale Conditional Cash Transfer program in the Philippines, which offers an ideal setting totest the...

A well-known time-inconsistency problem hinders optimal decision-making when policymakers are constrained in their pesent choices by expectations of future outcomes.  The time-inconsistency problem is caused by differences in the preferences of policymakers who exist at different points in...

This paper uses demographic data drawn from Wrigley et al.s (1997) family reconstitutions of 26 English parishes to adjust Allen’s (2001) real wages to the changing demography of early moden England.  Using parity progression ratios (a fertility measure) and age specific mortality for...

Participation in ‘friendly societies’ (or other cooperative organisations) is often used as proxy for measuring the stock of social capital. This is too simplistic. Friendly societies underwent radical changes over the nineteenth century and contemporaries regularly demoaned that...

Although Nigeria’s Benin region was a major rubber producer in 1960, the industry faltered before 1921. I use labour scarcity and state capacity to explain why rubber did not take hold in this period. The government was unable to protect Benin’s rubber forests from...

This chapter provides a brief introduction to the history of Britain’s engagement with the international economy between 1870 and 2010. It begins by discussing long run trends in the integration of the British economy with the rest of the world over time. Economic historians are typically...

How far were monetary targets imposed on the post-1974 Labour Government by international and domestic financial markets enthused with the doctrines of ‘monetarism’? The following paper attempts to answer this question by demonstrating the complex and contingent nature of the ascent...