This paper presents a joint analysis of labor market flexibility and product market structure. Our investigation confirms earlier results of imperfect competition in South African manufacturing where we find an average mark-up of 50% for the period 1970 to 2004 that is without consistent trend...

Failure in US high school courses is common, but little is known about its effects. This paper investigates the extent to which course repeaters in high school mathematics courses exert negative externalities on their course-mates. Using individual and school-specific course fixed effects to...

We provide the first solid evidence that Chinese superstitious beliefs can have significant effects on house prices in a North American market with a large immigrant population. Using real estate data on close to 117,000 house sales, we find that houses with address number ending in four are...

type="main" xml:lang="en" <p>We provide the first solid evidence that Chinese superstitious beliefs can have significant effects on house prices in a North American market with a large immigrant population. Using real estate data on close to 117,000 house sales, we find that houses with address...</p>

Recent cross-sectional growth studies have found that ethnolinguistic fractionalization is an important explanatory variable of long-run growth performance. In the present article, we follow the call of earlier studies to conduct a more detailed clinical analysis of the growth experience of a...

This paper considers conditions of optimality in a co-optive strategy of colonial rule. It proposes a simple model of elite formation emanating from a coloniser's quest to maximise extracted rents from its colonies. The results suggest multiple optimal solutions, depending on the specification...

This paper investigates the channels through which colonial origin affects economic outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). It focuses on four key channels of transmission namely, human capital, trade openness, market distortion and selection bias. In contrast with previous studies where only...