This paper examines the contractual practices of African manufacturing firms using survey data collected in Burundi, Cameroon, Cote d`Ivoire, Kenya, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Descriptive statistics and econometric results are presented. They show that contractual flexibility is pervasive and that...

If foreign aid undermines institutional development, aid recipients can exhibit the symptoms of `dependence` â۠a short-run benefit from aid, but increasing need for aid that is damaging in the long run. We show that this high-aid/weak-institutions state can be an equilibrium outcome...

Volunteering by young adults for working in Third World countries on development projects emerged in Britain the late 1950s. Three decades later, the countrys largest volunteering sending agency, Voluntary Service Overseas, had sent more than 21,000 people abroad. The most common explanation for...

Wheat was the single most important product of the British economy during the Industrial Revolution, being both the largest component of national income and the primary determinant of caloric intake. This paper offers new estimates of annual wheat production during industrialisation. Whereas...

London clubs provided a means of establishing gentlemanly status and of making useful connections. Their number and membership was large. The paper begins with a quantitative overview of gentlemens clubs in London in the late nineteenth century using information contained in contemporary...

The Industrial Revolution in England was characterised by early and rapid labour release from agriculture to industry. This was facilitated by rising levels of labour productivity in agriculture which permitted labour to be released without excessive upward pressure on food prices. New...

A marked acceleration of total factor productivity (TFP) growth in U.S. manufacturing followed World War I. This development contributed substantially to the absolute and relative rise of the domestic economys aggregate TFP residual, which is observed when the growth accounts for the first...

The payoffs of a symmetric 2x2 coordination game are perturbed by agent-specific heterogeneity. Individuals observe a (possibly sampled) history of play, which forms the initial hypothesis for an opponents behaviour. Seeding beliefs in this manner, they iteratively reason toward a Bayesian Nash...

This paper investigates the effect of recent reforms of budgetary institutions in Uganda and Zambia. We argue that cash budgeting has brought clear benefits in terms of improved expenditure control with regard to line ministries. However, contrary to what is often suggested, adoption of a cash...

Without information on the market values of the main components of household wealth, it is difficult to understand the behaviour of aggregate consumer spending and of the broad money holdings of households. This paper constructs the first coherent set of aggregate personal sector wealth...