It has long been hypothesised that public works programmes, in addition to the welfare effect on those directly employed, can influence equilibrium wage rates.  In this paper we test the impact of the Indian government’s major public works programme, the National Rural Employment...

High-profile universities often face public criticism for undermining academic merit and promoting social elitism/engineering through their admissions-process. In this paper, we develop an empirical test for whether access to selective universities is meritocratic. We assume that students who...

Information technology, like the telephone, influences market access; this paper answers the question about a reverse effect, does market access affect information technology, in particular its adoption?  Using the introduction of the telephone in Bavaria, I demonstrate with a rank, order and...

This paper develops a revealed preference methodology for exploring whether time inconsistencies in household choice are the product of nonstationarities at the individual level or the result of individual heterogeneity and renegotiation within the collective unit.  An empirical application to...

We consider forecasting with factors, variables and both, modeling in-sample using Autometrics so all principal components and variables can be included jointly, while tackling multiple breaks by impulse-indicator saturation.  A forecast-error taxonomy for factor models highlights the impacts...

The diffusion of an innovation can be represented by a process in which agents choose perturbed best responses to what their neighbors are currently doing.  Diffusion is said to be fast if the expected waiting time until the innovation spreads widely is bounded above independently of the size...

An influential thesis [Kuran, 2011, The Long Divergence] locates the economic failure of the Middle East in Islamic legal arrangements that laid the basis for organizational deficiencies.  This article critically scrutinizes this thesis using the lens of political economy and argues that...

If players learn to play an infinitely repeated game using Bayesian learning, it is known that their strategies eventually approximate Nash equilibria of the repeated game under an absolute-continuity assumption on their prior beliefs.  We suppose here that Bayesian learners do not start with...

In this paper, we analyse a novel panel data set to compare the relevance of alternative measures of capitalisation for bank failure during the 2007-10 crisis, and to search for evidence of manipulated Basel risk-weights.  Compared with the unweighted leverage ratio, we find the risk-weighted...

I construct a trade model of empire, and use it to interpret some of the key patterns in the history of European imperialism.  I begin from the observation that trade was a key source of wealth for the colonies, and trade restrictions a key tool of extraction for colonial powers.  But the...