The main thesis of this paper is that the ultimate cause of the current global financial crisis is to be found in the deeply flawed institutions and practices of what is often referred to as the New Financial Architecture (NFA) – a globally integrated system of giant bank conglomerates and the...

New information and communication technologies, we argue, have been 'power-biased': in many industries they have allowed firms to monitor workers more closely, thus reducing the power of these workers. An efficiency wage model shows that 'power-biased technical change' in this sense may generate...

In the wake of violent conflict, a key element of building a durable peace is building a state with the ability to collect and manage public resources. To implement peace accords and provide public services, the government must be able to collect revenue, allocate resources, and manage...

African countries have accumulated substantial foreign currency reserves in recent years, mostly from higher commodity exports as well as aid flows. In the context of macroeconomic stabilization, which remains at the forefront of national economic policymaking and aid conditionality, African...

Despite the recent increase in foreign direct investment (FDI) to African countries, these resources have not had a meaningful impact on economic development because of limited effects on domestic factor markets, especially domestic investment and employment. In this context, this study analyses...

Using estimates of earnings functions in Ghana, this paper examines patterns of labor market segmentation with regard to formal and informal employment. Persistent earnings differentials are used as indicators of limited mobility across segments of the employed labor force. We find evidence of...

Laws and policies designed to harness self-regarding preferences to public ends may fail when they compromise the beneficial effects of pro-social preferences. Experimental evidence indicates that incentives that appeal to self interest may reduce the salience of intrinsic motivation,...

A growing literature suggests that 'financialization' may weaken the performance of non-financial corporations and constrain the growth of ag- gregate demand. This paper evaluates (some of) the claims that have been made using two alternative approaches (one derived from Skott (1981, 1988, 1989)...

We consider the links between information and communications technologies (ICTs) and the distribution of income, as mediated by problems of coordination and control within organizations. In the large corporations of the mid-twentieth century, a highly developed division of labor was coordinated...

Recent post-liberalization decades have seen increasing gaps between wages and profit in- come, rising skill premia, and disappointing formal sector employment growth in many develop- ing countries. This paper presents an attempt to reconcile some of these developments with the help of modified...