This paper extends the relational contract model in Levin (2003) with shocks to theagent’s cost of effort (agent’s type) to shocks to the principal’s valuation of the agent’seffort (principal’s type). When optimal effort is fully pooled across agent types...

We estimate a model of wheat yields for eighteenth century England using village-level data. This is an entirely new approach to quantifying progress during the Agricultural Revolution and enables us to consider both environmental and technological inputs. We find that climate was a crucial...

Existing methods of reconstructing historical Euro-zone data by aggregation of the individual countries’ data raises numerous difficulties due to past exchange rate changes. The approach proposed here is designed to avoid such distortions, and aggregate exactly when exchange rates are...

The exchange between Epstein (2010) and Klibanoff et al. (2012) identified a behavioral issue that sharply distinguishes between two classes of models of ambiguity sensitivity, exemplified by the Î±-MEU model and the smooth ambiguity model, respectively. The issue in question is whether a...

This article explores the economic underpinnings of the arab spring. We locate the roots of the region’s long-term economic failure in a statist model of development that is financed through external windfalls and rests on inefficient forms of intervention and redistribution. We argue...

South Africa’s recent adoption of inflation targeting increases the need for good forecasting models of inflation and models for understanding the monetary transmission mechanism. This paper presents multi-step models for inflation and output, four-quarters ahead. The inflation model has...

This paper considers aspects of the evolution of ownership and control in global industries from 1960. The existing literature usually uses the largest firms in industrialized countries, to provide generalizations about national systems of corporate governance. In practice, this characterization...

Modern economic growth – the simultaneous increase in population and average incomes – has been capitalism’s greatest achievement. This growth first became apparent in Britain in the nineteenth century and then spread to continental Europe (and the United States). The...

Where do we stand, five years on from the start of the crisis, on progress towards banking reform? Major advances have been made, but a lot of unfinished business remains, notably on structural reform of banks. Following a stock-take of current reform initiatives, the paper reviews some...

This paper uses demographic data drawn from Wrigley et al.s (1997) family reconstitutions of 26 English parishes to adjust Allen’s (2001) real wages to the changing demography of early moden England.  Using parity progression ratios (a fertility measure) and age specific mortality for...