Maternal employment formed a central plank in the former Labour Government's strategy to reduce child poverty. Even where potential jobs were low-skilled and low-paid, policy was explicitly work (rather than training) first, and lone parents in particular were given direct and indirect financial...

We discuss how the use of field experiments sheds light on long standing research questions relating to firm behavior. We present insights from two classes of experiments: within and across firms, and draw common lessons from both sets. Field experiments within firms generally aim to shed light...

Nation-building has long been seen as an important focus for postcolonial African governments. However, up until now there has been no empirical analysis of either the origins or consequences of these policies. Here we compile an original dataset measuring nine different types of nation-building...

We analyze optimal contracts and optimal matching patterns in a simple model of partnership where there is a double-sided moral hazard problem and potential partners differ in their productivity in two tasks. It is possible for one individual to accomplish both tasks (sole production) and there...

For local and average kernel based estimators, smoothness conditions ensure that the kernel order determines the rate at which the bias of the estimator goes to zero and thus allows the econometrician to control the rate of convergence. In practice, even with smoothness the estimation errors may...

This CASEbrief summarises findings from CASEpaper 10, East Asian Social Welfare: A Comparative Analysis Including Private Welfare, by Didier Jacobs. which can be downloaded at http://sticerd.lse.ac.uk/dps/case/cp/paper10.pdf

This paper centres around the question of ownership of firms and managerial competition and how these affect manager and employees' incentives to invest in human capital. We argue that employee's incentives in human capital investment are affected by both ownership and competition since both...

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996 represents a dramatic change in the US welfare state. One of its key goals was to move lone mothers, even those with young children, from welfare to work. Early evidence suggests that, in concert with a strong...

Power law or generalized polynomial regressions with unknown real-valued exponents and coefficients, and weakly dependent errors, are considered for observations over time, space or space-time. Consistency and asymptotic normality of nonlinear least squares estimates of the parameters are...

We re-visit the single-agent mechanism design problem with quasi-linear preferences, but we assume that the principal knowingly operates on the basis of only an approximate type space rather than the (potentially complex) truth. We propose a two-step scheme, the profit-participation mechanism,...