The World's nations have yet to reach a truly effective treaty to control the emission of greenhouse gases.  The importance of compatibility with private incentives of individual countries has been acknowledged (at least by game theorists) in designing climate policies for the post-Kyoto...

We identify anthropogenic contributions to atmospheric CO2 measured at Mauna Loa using a statistical automatic model selection algorithm (Autometrics).  We find that vegetation, temperature and other natural factors alone cannot explain the trend or the variation in CO2 growth.  Industrial...

We provide a general characterization of which firms will select alternative ways of serving a market.  If and only if firms' maximum profits are supermodular in production and market-access costs, more efficient firms will select into the activity with lower market-access costs.  Our result...

This paper undertakes a comparison exercise to disentangle what drives the opposite findings regarding the effect of house prices on consumption documented in two papers using the same data set for the UK.  On the one hand, Campbell and Cocco (2007) find that old owners are the most benefited...

We use a sharp, exogenous and repeated change in the value of leisure to identify the impact of student effort on educational achievement.  The treatment arises from the partial overlap of the world's major international football tournaments with the exam period in England.  Our data enable a...

This paper provides an overview of a new database that contains intellectual property data - in the form of patents and trademarks - for the population of firms registered in the UK.  The paper discusses the principal challenges involved in the construction of this integrated database and...

Using detailed time-use data for seven industrialized countries from the 1970s until today we document general decreases in men's market work coupled with increases in men's unpaid work and child care, and increases in women's paid work and child care coupled with decreases in unpaid work.  We...

This paper studies the contracting problem between banks and their bankers, embedded in a competitive labour market for banker talent.  To motivate effort banks must use some variable remuneration.  Such remuneration introduces a risk-shifting problem by creating incentives to inflate early...

I construct a theory of foreign interventions in which the political preferences of the foreign country are determined by its different economic ties with alternative local groups.  Stronger economic ties make a group more influenceable from the outside, and thus more willing to grant economic...

The paper measures productivity growth in seventeen countries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  GDP per worker and capital per worker in 1985 US dollars were estimated for 1820, 1850, 1880, 1913, 1939 by using historical national accounts to back cast Penn World Table data for 1965...