Critics of Lula's administration argue that business has greatest weight in setting its priorities and that anti-poverty programmes based on conditional cash transfers have little long-term structural impact on social inequality. Yet the coherence and scope of these programmes is now an order of...

Brazilian slums and squatter settlements have acquired a generally unattractive public image that often obscures differences between peripheral urban situations. Based on research in a socially stigmatised neighbourhood of the city of Salvador, Bahia, this paper begins with a broad structural...

There has been a dramatic surge in Islamic participation and values since the 1970s.  We propose a theory of the contemporary Islamic revival based upon two forms of relative deprivation - envy and unfulfilled aspirations.  To analyze these motivations, a behavioral model of religion is...

Game harmony is a generic game property that can be used to predict cooperation in both generic and well-known normal form games. It describes how harmonious (non-conflictual) or disharmonious (conflictual) the interests of players are, as embodied in the payoffs. Pure coordination games are...

It is often claimed that large buyers wield buyer power.  Existing theories of this effect generally assume upstream monopoly.  Yet the evidence is strongest with upstream competition.  We show that upstream competition can yield buyer power for large buyers by generating supplier-level...

In many rural settings, informal mutual support networks have evolved into semiformal insurance groups, such as funeral societies.  Using detailed panel data for six villages in Ethiopia, we can distinguish two types of contracts, in terms of whether payments are only made at the time of death...

Data from three bargaining games - the Dictator Game, the Ultimatum Game, and the Third-Party Punishment Game - played in 15 societies are presented.  The societies range from US undergraduates to Amazonian, Arctic, and African hunter-gatherers.  Behaviour within the games varies markedly...

Financial liberalisation and innovation (FLIB) in Australia over the 1980s and 1990s provided the institutional backdrop for one of the most rapid increases in household balance sheets and house prices in the world.  An equilibrium correction model of quarterly Australian house prices for...

Hurricanes in the Caribbean and Central America represent a natural experiment to test the intertemporal approach to current account determination. The intertemporal approach allows for the possibility of intertemporal trade, via international borrowing. Previous tests of intertemporal current...