The paper considers the irreversible investment response to trade liberalisation when agents perceive there to be a positive probability that the liberalisation may be reversed. It is shown that even with full credibility the aggregate investment response may be weak since investment will...

In Norman (2003), the introduction of individual strategy switching costs, and thus inertia, into stochastic evolutionary coordination games was found inter alia to strengthen the mixed-strategy equilibrium as a short- to medium-run equilibrium. This paper considers the impact of such switching...

Tests for the efficiency wage hypothesis have proposed to use production functions to ask if wage increases can pay for themselves. Tests for rent sharing have used a profit term in the earnings function. In this note the relationship between these tests is investigated empirically. Evidence is...

In this paper we consider the link often alleged between ethnic diversity and the growth rate of GDP per capita. We first assume that it is ethnic polarization rather than ethnic fragmentation that is harmful for growth so that the relationship may be nonlinear. Second, we hypothesize that the...

Using micro-level panel data from villages in rural Ethiopia, the paper uses standard decompositions of income changes and develops a new decomposition of poverty changes to analyse the determinants of growth and poverty changes during a period of economic reform (1989-95). Consumption grew and...

It is commonly claimed that the South African labor market is unusually inflexible owing to the strength of the unions and the system of centralized collective bargaining. One aspect of labor market inflexibility concerns the responsiveness of wages to local unemployment. Examining this spatial...

A positive correlation between relative position and the neurotransmitter serotonin exists in non-human primates, within an optimal range. This paper explores the reasons of this correlation. The main function of serotonin appears cognitive: it determines how optimally agents perceive and behave...

Evolving openness to trade is hard to measure, despite its relevance to models of growth, inflation and exchange rates. Our innovative technique measures trade openness encompassing both observable trade policy (tariffs and surcharges) and unobservable trade policy (quotas and other non-tariff...

This paper analyses the effect of limits on fiscal deficits when fiscal policy outcomes depend on automatic stabilizers and when fiscal rules lack perfect credibility. The model developed, which includes interactions between monetary and fiscal policy, provides theoretical support for existing...

This paper introduces a non-parametric binary classification tree approach to inferring unobserved strategies from the observed actions of economic agents. The strategies are in the form of possibly nested if-then statements. We apply our approach to experimental data from the repeated ultimatum...