This paper investigates the relationship between skills acquisition and job characteristics using a panel dataset of individuals in urban Ghana by analyzing on-the-job skills acquisition and exploring the link between mathematics skills and jobs which involve the handling of money.  These...

On the occasion of the hundredth issue of the Discussion Papers, this special number contains reflections on the past and future of economic and social history at Oxford and in general.  Five scholars, who have been associated with the subject at Oxford, contribute with personal reflections on...

This is a draft Chapter from a book by the authors on “Levy Driven Volatility Modelsâ€.

This article explores the economic underpinnings of the arab spring. We locate the roots of the region’s long-term economic failure in a statist model of development that is financed through external windfalls and rests on inefficient forms of intervention and redistribution. We argue...

This paper provides a historical look at how the multilateral trading system has coped with the challenge of shocks and shifts.  By shocks we mean sudden jolts to the world economy in the form of financial crises and deep recessions, or wars and political conflicts.  By shifts we mean...

When European powers partitioned Africa, individuals of otherwise homogeneous communities were divided and found themselves randomly assigned to one coloniser. This provides for a natural experiment: applying a border discontinuity analysis to Ghana and Togo, we test what impact...

This paper analyses characteristics and determinants of the recent explosion of patent filings by Chinese firms both in China and the United States.  We construct a firm-level dataset by matching USPTO and SIPO patents to Chinese manufacturing census data for the period 1999-2006.  Using this...

How much does public capital matter for economic growth? How large should it be? This paper attempts to answer these questions, taking the case of SSA countries. It develops and estimates a model that posits a nonlinear relationship between public investment and growth, to determine the...

A large literature describes how local risk sharing networks can help individuals smooth consumption in the face of idiosyncratic economic shocks.  However, when an entire community faces a large covariate shock, and when the transaction costs of transfers are high, these risk sharing networks...

In 2003 Kenya abolished user fees in all government primary schools. We find that this Free Primary Education (FPE) policy resulted in a decline in public school quality and increased demand for private schooling.  However, the former did not reflect a decline in value added by public schools -...