Party activists wish to (i) advocate the best policy and yet (ii) unify behind a common party line. An activist`s understanding of his environment is based on the speeches of party leaders. A leader`s influence, measured by the weight placed on her speech, increases with her judgement on policy...

An industry in decline provides an appropriate setting for the theory that mergers and acquisitions destroy implicit contracts and allow for the shedding of excess labour. We test this theory using provincial data from the South African gold mining industry, which has been in decline over the...

The paper surveys recent work on learning in games and delineates the boundary between forms of learning that lead to Nash equilibrium and forms that lead to weaker notions of equilibrium (or none at all).

What drives migration and remittance behaviour in South Africa, and what are the implications for public policy? This paper evaluates existing empirical evidence, posits a simple theoretical model and undertakes a fresh evaluation using longitudinal data spanning 1993 to 2004 from KwaZula-Natal...

Can we devise mechanisms that allow voters to express the intensity of their preferences when monetary transfers are forbidden? Would we then be able to take account of how much voters wish the approval or dismissal of any particular issue? In such cases, would some minorities be able to decide...

This paper examines the rationale for multilateral agreements to limit investment subsidies. The welfare ranking of symmetric multilateral subsidy games is shown to depend on whether or not investment levels are friendly, raising rival profits in total, and/or strategic complements, raising...

This paper uses the adoption and invention of the spinning jenny as a test case to understand why the industrial revolution occurred in Britain in the eighteenth century rather than in France or India.  It is shown that wages were much higher relative to capital prices in Britain than in other...

This paper demonstrates that inertia driven by switching costs leads to more rapid evolution in a class of games that includes m x m pure coordination games. Under the best-response dynamic and a fixed rate of mutation, the expected waiting time to reach long-run equilibrium is of lower order in...

An increasingly important organisational design problem for many firms is to recoup general human capital rents while maintaining attractive career prospects for workers. We explore the role of information management in this context. In our model, an information management policy determines the...

This paper estimates the Heckscher-Ohlin (HO) model of international specialization with a panel of 44 developing and developed countries between 1976 and 2000. As Schott (2003), our empirical model includes multiple cones and recasts industry-level data in theoretically appropriate HO...