This report is a summary of the data collected in fieldwork for an overall research project on the poverty reducing effects of migrant remittances, and their effects on the informalisation of economy and society. The research seeks to explore the extent to which migrant remittance transfers...

Social scientists use the history of Spain and her empire as a standard against which they have sought to establish the relatively superior efficiency of Anglo-Saxon institutions. This historical `experiment` underpins the core argument of new-institutional economic history. This paper argues...

Coffee is Uganda`s most important export good. Post-liberalisation, increased competitiveness has increased the extent to which the coffee price fluctuates throughout the marketing chain. Using original survey data collected at all levels of the value chain this paper examines which actors are...

This paper asks how well a general equilibrium agency cost model describes the dynamic relationship between credit variables and the business cycle. A Bayesian VAR is used to obtain probability intervals for empirical correlations. The agency cost model is found to predict the leading,...

Using matched employer-employee data from eleven African countries, we investigate if there is job sorting in African labor markets. We find that much of the wage gap correlated with education is driven by selection across occupations and firms. This is consistent with educated workers being...

Post-conflict societies face two distinctive challenges: economic recovery and risk reduction. Aid and policy reforms have been found to be highly effective in the economic recovery. In this paper we concentrate on the other challenge, risk reduction. The post-conflict peace is typically...

This paper provides estimates of wage dispersion in nineteenth-century Barcelona and documents the compression of the pay distribution between 1856 and 1905. A decomposition of inequality changes by sector and gender leads to two conclusions. First, that most of the changes occurred within each...

Accounts of the British fertility decline have turned on the rise of the male breadwinner family, which by placing the responsibility for supporting women and children on men converted them to a preference for smaller families. This paper uses working-class autobiography of the eighteenth and...

Interpreting the role of expanding transport in overall production growth in the nineteenth century is still hampered by our lack of understanding of how much and when ocean shipping costs began to fall. This paper exploits new output and freight rate data for one of the world`s largest merchant...

The recent literature has shown that subjective welfare depends on relative income. Attempts to test this relationship in poor countries have yielded conflicting results, suggesting that the relationship is not universal or only applies above a certain income level. We revisit the issue using...