Societies in Western civilisation enforce their rules through formal institutions such as secularism (SES), whereas in less developed civilisations often rely on informal institutions such as religion (RES). The present paper attempts to explain the determinants of societies’ choice between...

The paper reviews and interprets capital structure theory in a stylized way and explains the conceptual issues, consequences, and implications for financial management. Firms face an uncertain world that does not co-operate with many of the assumptions of the theory. Specific attention is paid...

This paper uses a model with transaction costs and imperfect competition in the land market to analyze the efficiency and welfare effects of land reforms. We show that removing only one imperfection may have very different efficiency and welfare effects than would otherwise result from reforms...

This paper investigates the macroeconomic importance of credit rationing and whether banks use characteristics such as ownership structure and institutional type of borrowers in order to regulate the risk of loaned funds. To test this, monthly data for 2000–2002, extracted from the National...

We investigate how ethnicity, gender and other characteristics affect low-paid workers' perceptions of their employability in London's labour market, examining self-efficacy, ethnic and dual labour market theories. We find that perceptions vary considerably, both between genders and ethnicities...

This paper integrates theoretical and empirical models to study the rise of human obesity in Russia during the transition from a planned to a market economy. To test our hypotheses we use recent individual-level data from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey for 1995 and 2004 capturing...

In this paper we study the determinants of the factor content of the CEE agricultural trade. Examining empirically three hypothesis, which relate cross-country differences in technology, relative factor abundance and transaction costs and market imperfections to the factor content of trade we...