In many markets firms set posted prices which are potentially negotiable.  We analyze the optimal marketing mix of pricing and bargaining when price takers buy at posted prices but bargainers attempt to negotiate discounts.  The optimal bargaining strategy involves the firms offering...

This paper presents a simple model of risk-averse banks that face uncertainty over funding conditions in the money market.  It shows when increased funding uncertainty causes interest rates on loans and deposits to rise, while bank lending and bank profitability fall.  It also finds that...

Previous research has shown little difference in the average leisure time of men and women.  This finding is a challenge to the second shift argument, which suggests that increases in female labor market hours have not been compensated by equal decreases in household labor.  This paper...

This paper uses the introduction of the national minimum wage in the UK in April 1999 as a 'natural experiment' to analyse the impact of minimum wages on enrolment in schooling.  At the time of its introduction, only workers aged 18 years or more were covered by the legislation.  The paper...

In this paper we use a dynamic structural life-cycle model to analyze the employment, fiscal and welfare effects induced by unemployment insurance.  The model features a detailed specification of the tax and transfer system, including unemployment insurance benefits which depend on an...

Motivated by features of low latency data in finance we study in detail discrete-valued Levy processes as the basis of price processes for high frequency econometrics.  An important case of this is a Skellam process, which is the difference of two independent Poisson processes.  We propose a...

Background: Most developing countries face shortages of health workers in rural areas.  This has profound consequences for health service delivery, and ultimately for health outcomes.  To design policies that rectify these geographic imbalances it is vital to understand what factors determine...

This paper shows that income shocks to rural households have permanent effects on the eductional attainment of 7-15 year old children within the household.  Using a 13 year panel survey of households in rural Tanzania, I find that idiosyncratic crop shocks such as pests, theft and fire cause...

In mature democracies, elections discipline leaders to deliver good economic performance.  Since the fall of the Soviet Union most developing countries also hold elections, but these are often marred by illicit tactics.  Using a new global data set, this paper investigates whether these...

Poverty has halved in Ghana over the period from 1991 to 2005.  Our objective in this paper is to assess how far this fall was linked to the creation of better paying jobs and the increase in education.  We find that earnings rose rapidly in the period from 1998 to 2005, by 64% for men and by...