Failure in the training market may result from credit constraints and the inability to insure against labour income uncertainty, deterring potential trainees, or labour market imperfections that create external benefits for firms. This paper constructs a model of a training market affected by...

In the 1980s conditional lending for structural adjustment in developing countries moved the IMF beyond its role of macroeconomic crisis management. Fund-supported adjustment programmes have often been flawed by a lack of distributional analysis and by poor sequencing of reforms, notably...

Exports of labour-intensive manufactures from sub-Saharan Africa are negligible with the exception of Mauritius. Such exports from Ghana are low relative to other sub-Saharan African countries and relative to what would be predicted by its factor endowment. Firm level data from the two countries...

A large amount of recent evidence finds a negative relationship between local unemployment and wages in OECD countries, a relationship christened a ‘wage curve’. This contradicts the conventional model of the labour market in which high unemployment regions have higher wages to compensate...

Rural households have been suspected to rely heavily on goods and services freely provided by environmental resources. However, there has been no adequate quantitative analysis of this issue due to a lack of appropriate household data sets encompassing economic and environmental data. We use a...

With the overthrow of the Derg in 1991, some 500,000 ex-soldiers needed to be demobilized and reintegrated back into their communities. Successfully integrating such a large number of ex-soldiers is clearly important to social stability. While carefully targeted assistance is necessary,...

Analysis of five nationally representative household surveys from Uganda show a fall in poverty from 1992-1997. Using an absolute poverty line calculated following Ravallion and Bidani, we find 56% of Ugandans were poor in 1992 falling to 44% in 1997/8. The conclusion that poverty fell is robust...

We show in an exchange economy with liquidity constraints that the volume of trade and asset prices depend on both the supply of liquidity by the Central Bank and on the liquidity of assets and commodities.  As a result, monetary aggregates are informative for the assessment of economic...

We posit that screening IPOs requires specialized labor which, in the short run, is in fixed supply.  Hence, a sudden increase in demand for IPO financing increases the compensation of IPO screening labor.  Increased compensation results in reduced screening which encourages sub-marginal firms...

This paper considers optimal compensation for a CEO who is entrusted with administering corporate assets honestly.  Optimal compensation designs maximize integrity at minimum cost.  These designs are very 'low powered', i.e., while specifying a lower bound for performance and increasing pay...