A fundamental macroeconomic problem in Zimbabwe is that the sum of public-sector projects is greater than the resources available to finance them. The government`s difficulty in discerning the macroeconomic limitations on new initiatives was greatly increased by the unusual circumstances of the...

Drawing upon data from Ethiopia, we highlight the relationship between investments in child schooling and key factors related to household characteristics, supply and quality of schooling, and income shocks. The unique contribution of this study stems from our examination of the effect of...

This paper examines the patenting behavior of firms in an industry characterized by rapid technological change and cumulative innovation. Recent survey evidence suggests that semiconductor firms do not rely heavily on patents to appropriate the returns to R&D, despite the strengthening of US...

South Africa’s unemployment rate is one of the highest in the world, and it has important distributional implications. The paper examines the incidence of unemployment using two national household surveys for the mid-1990s. Both entry to unemployment and the duration of unemployment are...

We infer unobserved strategies from the observed actions of buyers in posted-offer market experiments to evaluate their effectiveness against a monopolist. While the strategies of one-quarter of the buyers in our experiments correspond to the game-theoretic prediction of passive price-taking,...

This paper examines the (non) equivalance between aid flows and trade preferences as alternative forms of donor assistance in the presence of learning-by-doing externalities in recipient country export production. Using a two-period model based on vanWijnbergen (1985), in which the productivity...

It is commonly asserted that such problems as inner-city traffic congestion and pollution can be understood as examples of the Prisoner`s Dilemma Game (PD), but there is a dearth of empirical research that tests this assertion. 587 car owners in Oxford City were presented with three pairs of...

Recent evidence from Pakistan points to significant pro-male bias within households in the allocation of education expenditures. This raises two important questions: Is less spent on enrolled girls than boys through differential school-type choice for the two sexes, for example through a greater...

A large amount of recent evidence finds a negative relationship between local unemployment and wages in OECD countries, a relationship christened a ‘wage curve’. This contradicts the conventional model of the labour market in which high unemployment regions have higher wages to compensate...

This paper intends to harmonize two different approaches to the analysis of the business cycle and in doing so it retrieves the stylized facts of the business cycle in Europe. We start with the `classical` approach proposed in Burns and Mitchell (1946) of dating and analyzing the business cycle;...