Policy-makers have confronted welfare dependence and poverty among single mothers by imposing work requirements and time limits on the receipt of welfare benefits. Reforms with such features have generally reduced programme case-loads and increased the employment and earnings of single mothers....

Is international migration an adaptation strategy to sudden or gradual climatic shocks? In this paper we investigate the direct and the indirect role of climatic shocks in developing countries as a determinant of out-migration flows toward rich OECD countries in the period 1990-2001. Contrarily...

We present a bargaining model of wage and employment determination, where we show that foreign acquisitions might hurt the bargaining outcome of powerful unions by giving the fi rm a credible threat to move production abroad. Using detailed data on fi rms and workers in manufacturing, including...

In late 2003, Norway passed a law mandating 40 percent representation of each gender on the board of publicly limited liability companies. The primary objective of this reform was to increase the representation of women in top positions in the corporate sector and decrease gender disparity in...

This study investigates whether and when during the life cycle women fall behind in terms of career progression because of children. We use 1987-1997 Norwegian panel data that contain information on individuals’ position in their career hierarchy as well as a direct measure of their...

Using a spatial competition framework with three ex ante identical firms, we study the effects of a horizontal merger on quality, price and welfare. The merging firms always reduce quality. They also increase prices if demand responsiveness to quality is sufficiently low. The non-merging firm,...

We study how leader compensation affects public goods provision. We report from a lab experiment with four treatments, where the base treatment was a standard public goods game with simultaneous contribution decisions, while the three other treatments allowed participants to volunteer to be the...

Pension funds and sovereign-wealth funds own a large and increasing fraction of the shares in publicly traded companies in the OECD area. These funds typically have a very long time horizon on their investments, as well as highly diversified portfolios. These features imply that the interests of...

In this paper, we consider a population of ndividuals who differ in two dimensions: their risk type (expected loss) and their risk aversion. We solve for the profit maximizing menu of contracts that a monopolistic insurer puts out on the market. First, we …nd that it is never optimal to fully...

In 1795 the British took control of the Cape colony (South Africa) from the Dutch; and in 1843 they exogenously changed the legal basis of landholding, giving more secure property rights to landholders. Since endowments and other factors were held constant, these changes offer clean tests of the...