On the basis of a comparative study of 23 episodes involving commodity price shocks we find that both the public and private sectors typically save around half of a windfall gain resulting from a price rise. We argue that private windfalls should be left with the private sector rather than...

Empirical work in labour economics has focused on rent sharing as an explanation for the observed correlation in cross-sections between wages and profitability. The alternative explanation of risk sharing between workers and employers has not been tested. Using a unique panel data set for four...

The current commodity boom is a major opportunity for poor countries exportingexhaustible resources such as oil. In the past oil booms were often mismanaged leaving the country with lower long run income. Many countries are now well aware that booms require intricate savings and investment...

In this paper we investigate if the predictions of three different models of capital adjustment costs are consistent with the observed investment patterns among manufacturing firms in five African countries. We document a high frequency of zero investment episodes, which is consistent with both...

In this paper, we use firm-level panel data for the manufacturing sector in four African countries to estimate the effect of exporting on efficiency. Estimating simultaneously a production function and an export regression that control for unobserved firm effects, we find both significant...

We investigate the question whether firms in the manufacturing sector in Africa are credit constrained. The fact that few firms obtain credit is not sufficient to prove constraints, since certain firms may not have a demand for credit while others may be refused credit as part of profit...

In this paper, we use firm-level panel data for the manufacturing sector in four African countries to estimate the effect of exporting on efficiency. Measures of firm-level efficiency using stochastic production frontier models are constructed for the period 1992 to 1995. We find that there are...

Firm-level data for the manufacturing sector in Africa, presented in this paper, shows very low levels of investment. A positive effect from profits onto investment is identified in a flexible accelerator specification of the investment function controlling for firm fixed effects. There is...