This paper compares the value of landed and non-landed wealth held by a group of nineteenth century British businessmen. Landed wealth is estimated from the data in John Batemans Great Landowners of Britain and Ireland. Non-landed wealth is documented in probate records. Quantitative evidence...

The term path dependence (PD) here refers to a dynamic property of allocative processes, pertaining to non-ergodic stochastic systems -- those whose asymptotic distributions evolve as a function of the history of the process itself. PD is shown to be neither necessary nor sufficient for the...

Witnesses accounts are used to analyse changes in working hours between 1750 and 1800. Two findings stand out. The paper demonstrates that the information contained in witnesses accounts allows us to reconstruct historical time-budgets, and provides extensive tests of the new method. It also...

In rural areas of LDC, because of the existence of market imperfections, health and nutrition status may depend on the levels of specific agricultural productions and not only on the income level. However, these specific impacts have never been studied. We estimate, from a sequential...

Real wage rates in Ghana have fallen substantially over the last twenty years. In this paper survey data for the years 1991-1996 is used to assess whether this fall has continued in the 1990s. It is shown that the fall in average real wage rates has continued, the relative wage of skilled labour...

Using panel data from Rwanda, we estimate seasonal transient and chronic poverty indices, for different poverty line, poverty indicators, equivalence scale, and with and without the corrections for price variability and for the sampling scheme. We also estimate sampling standard errors for the...

This paper examines the impact of minimum wage legislation in developing countries where coverage is incomplete. Using a rich data set from Ghana, it estimates the extent to which a binding minimum wage alters employment in both the formal and informal sectors of the labor market. The data...

The paper considers the irreversible investment response to trade liberalisation when agents perceive there to be a positive probability that the liberalisation may be reversed. It is shown that even with full credibility the aggregate investment response may be weak since investment will...

To investigate risk-sharing within the household, we model nutritional status as a durable good and we look at the consequences of individual health shocks. For household allocation to be pareto-efficient, households should pool shocks to income. We also investigate whether households can smooth...

A fundamental macroeconomic problem in Zimbabwe is that the sum of public-sector projects is greater than the resources available to finance them. The government`s difficulty in discerning the macroeconomic limitations on new initiatives was greatly increased by the unusual circumstances of the...