We develop a model of unforeseen contingencies. These are contingencies that are understood by economic agents – their consequences and probabilities are known – but are such that every description of such events necessarily leaves out relevant features that have a non-negligible impact on...

In a model of career concerns for experts, when is the principal hurt from observing more information about her agent? This paper introduces a distinction between information on the consequence of the agent's action and information directly on the agent's action. It is the latter kind that can...

This paper assesses whether there is a systematic difference between the accident rates of fixed term and permanent contract workers that is not just the result of a compositional effect. A pure contractual effect might exist because the short duration of the temporary contract reduces the...

This paper examines the determinants of inside spreads and their behaviour around corporate earning announcement dates, for a sample of UK firms over the period 1986-94. The paper finds that closing daily inside spreads are affected by order processing costs (proxied by trading volumes),...

We analyse the determinants of the decline in measured research productivity (the patent/R&D ratio) using panel data on manufacturing firms in the U.S. for the period 1980-93. We focus on three factors: the level of demand, the quality of patents, and technological exhaustion. We first develop...

This paper investigates the impact on the wage distribution of the introduction, in April 1999, of the National Minimum Wage in the UK. Because of the structure of UK earnings statistics, it is not straightforward to investigate this and a number of different methods for adjusting the published...

In this paper we analyse data that were collected continuously between 1950 and 1974 from a rural area of The Gambia to determine the effects of kin on child mortality. Multilevel event history models are used to demonstrate that having a living mother, maternal grandmother or elder sisters had...

This paper studies the design of law-making and law enforcement institutions based on the premise that law is inherently incomplete. Under incomplete law, law enforcement by courts may suffer from deterrence failure, defined as the socialwelfare loss that results from the regime's inability to...

We study an economy where agents are heterogeneous in terms of observable wealth and unobservable talent. Adverse selection forces creditors to ask for collateral. We study the two-way interaction between rationing in the credit market and the wages offered in the labour market. Both pooling and...

This paper derives the asymptotic distribution of nonparametric neural network estimator of the Lyapunov exponent in a noisy system proposed by Nychka et al (1992) and others. Positivity of the Lyapunov exponent is an operational definition of chaos. We introduce a statistical framework for...