Following the wave of democratization during the 1990s, elections are now common in low-income societies.  However, these elections are frequently flawed.  We investigate the Nigerian general election of 2007, which is to date the largest election held in Africa and one seriously marred by...

This paper examines the operation of an emissions trading scheme (ETS) in a Cournot oligopoly.  We study the impact of the ETS on industry output, price, costs, emissions, and profits.  In particular, we develop formulae for the number of emissions permits that have to be freely allocated to...

Estimated characteristic roots in stationary autoregressions are shown to give rather noisy information about their population equivalents.  This is remarkable given the central role of the characteristic roots in the theory of autoregressive processes.  In the asymptotic analysis the problems...

Drawing on a new and comprehensive measure of logistics quality, our gravity model suggests logistics in the exporting and partner-country can have an important impact on bilateral exports.  A one standard deviation improvement in the exporter's logistics quality, which for example would...

Surprisingly little is known about the impact of resource booms on income inequality in resource rich countries (Ross, 2007).  This paper develops a simple theory, in the context of a two sector growth model in which learning-by-doing drives growth, to explain the time path of inequality...

An algorithm suggested by Hendry (1999) for estimation in a regression with more regressors than observations, is analyzed with the purpose of finding an estimator that is robust to outliers and structural breaks.  This estimator is an example of a one-step M-estimator based on Huber's skip...

Although it is a common theoretical assumption that the chances to find a job fall with time in unmeployment, this is not systematically confirmed by empirical evidence, and there is no evidence for developing countries.  We develop a farmework that allows us to test the four major explanations...

In this paper we ask how technological differences in manufacturing across countries can best be modeled when using a standard production function approach.  We show that it is important to allow for differences in technology as measured by differences in parameters.  Of similar importance are...

Why do some people choose corruption over honesty and others not?  Do the social norms and values prevailing in the societies in which they grew up affect their decisions?  In 2005, we conducted a bribery experiment and found that, among undergraduates, we could predict who would act corruptly...

Why is it that couples who have a son or whose last child is a son earn higher conditional income?  To solve this curious case we tell a detective story: evidence of a phenomenon to be explained, a parade of suspects, a process of elimination from the enquiry, and then the denouement.  Given...