The growth of cotton textile imports into Britain from India opened up new opportunities for import substitution as the new cloths, patterns and designs became increasingly fashionable. However, high silver wages in Britain as a result of high productivity in other tradable goods and services,...

This paper addresses a number of questions which are essential to a proper understanding of the causes and effects of the inflationary process and to an assessment of the contribution of monetary policy to the achievement of long-term price stability. These questions are: (1) what are the...

This Paper examines optimal incentives and performance measurement in a setting where an agent has specific knowledge about the consequences of their actions for the principal. I study incentive contracts in which the agent’s compensation can be based on both ‘input’ measures closely...

Using a data set containing 364 UK pension funds’ asset holdings, this paper provides a systematic investigation of the performance of managed portfolios across multiple asset classes. We find surprisingly little cross-sectional variation in the ex-post average performance across the UK...

Using data from a large, U.S. federal job training program, we investigate whether enrolment incentives that exogenously vary the ‘shadow prices’ for serving different demographic subgroups of clients influence case workers’ intake decisions. We show that case workers enroll more clients...

We examine a simple measure of portfolio performance based on prospect theory, which captures not only risk and return but also reflects differential aversion to upside and downside risk. The measure we propose is a ratio of gains to losses, with the gains and losses weighted (if desired) to...

An important lesson from the incentive literature is that explicit incentives may elicit dysfunctional and unintended responses, also known as gaming responses. The existence of these responses, however, is difficult to demonstrate in practice because this behaviour is typically hidden from the...

This Paper uses a unique representative firm level data set to analyse the effect of domestic and international competitive pressure and ownership changes in three emerging economies, Bulgaria Poland and Romania. Our main findings can be summarized as follows: Domestic competitive pressure,...

This study examines the impact locational spillovers have on firm performance. Based on a uniquely created dataset consisting of high-technology start-ups publicly listed in Germany, this paper tests the proposition of locational spillovers positively affecting firm performance, as measured by...