The authors explore the current state of the theory of the firm, with attention to its historical origins. Answers to the crucial theoretical question of why an organization c ontrolled by a central authority cannot always duplicate the performa nce of a decentralized organization are presented....

ESAU Working Paper 6 finds evidence from eight countries having suffered significant, multi-year, falls in per capita incomes, that the majority made remarkable swift economic recoveries. Their record differs from the conclusions presented in the some of the post-conflict literature according to...

We consider the consequences of the regular private meetings between directors of FTSE 100 companies and their major institutional shareholders. Whilst the economic incentives for both the flow of information and the formation of 'strategic informational relationships' between the two have been...

The authors show that the seller's problem in devising an optimal auction is virtually identical to the monopolist's problem in third-degree price discrimination. More generally, many of the important results and elegant techniques developed in the field of mechanism design can be reinterpreted...

The paper provides an account of aspects of exchange-rate economics that are of particular relevance to the resources sector. The issues discussed include exchange-rate volatility and risk management practices used to deal with it, the role of productivity differences across countries, the...

ESAU Working Paper 5 examines the contrasting growth experiences of Kenya and Bangladesh since the 1960s. The paper finds that, before 1980, Kenya grew strongly, and the economy diversified. Factors behind its subsequent deterioration in the 1990s were the government’s erratic, inflation-prone...

This paper asks whether the costs of providing public services in low-income developing countries tend to rise when expenditure on these services increases - as has been found to be the case in developed countries. It offers elements of an answer to this question by reference to evidence from...

A number of hypotheses have been proposed to account for the role of lagged inflation in the New Keynesian price-adjustment model: (1) In the aftermath of abrupt structural change, rational learning may appear adaptive. (2) The model may have a serially correlated error term. (3) Estimating the...