We review evidence regarding the size and evolution of the "land rush" in the wake of the 2007-2008 boom in agricultural commodity prices and study determinants of foreign land acquisition for large-scale agricultural investment. Using data on bilateral investment relationships to estimate...

At the start of the Second World War, British policies restricted rubber planting in Nigeria’s Benin region. After Japan occupied Southeast Asia, Britain encouraged maximum production of rubber in Benin. Late in the war, officials struggled with the planting boom that had occurred. The...

The spatial distribution of oil is determined by natural geography alone. However, we show that the distribution of oil exploration is affected by the quality of countries’ institutions. A global data set on the precise location of oil wells and national borders allows for a regression...

South Africa experienced substantial rises in the ratios of consumption and household debt to income from 1983, for which conventional explanations in terms of income, income expectations, interest rates and wealth prove inadequate. This paper emphasizes the role of substantial financial...

Africa is well endowed with potential for hydro and solar power, but its other endowments - shortages of capital, skills, and governance capacity - make most of the green options relatively expensive, while its abundance of hydro-carbons makes fossil fuels relatively cheap.  Current power...

Social instability is a concept that economists rarely analyse, and yet it can lurk behind much economic policy-making.  China’s leadership has often publicly expressed its concerns to avoid ‘social instability’.  It is viewed as a threat both to the political order and to...

In this paper we investigate how cognitive ability influences behavior, success and theevolution of play towards Nash equilibrium in repeated strategic interactions. We study behaviorin a p-beauty contest experiment and find striking differences according to cognitiveability: more cognitively...

It has long been hypothesised that public works programmes, in addition to the welfare effect on those directly employed, can influence equilibrium wage rates.  In this paper we test the impact of the Indian government’s major public works programme, the National Rural Employment...

Many interactive environments can be represented as games, but they are so large and complex that individual players are in the dark about others' actions and the payoff structure.  This paper analyzes learning behavior in such 'black box' environments, where players' only source of information...

Using data for 128 countries we document low (high) elasticities of agricultural output with respect to labor in economies within temperate (tropical/highland) climate zones.  Adopting a standard model of structural change we show that this technology heterogeneity determines the speed of...