Early modern naturalists were faced with what has been termedthe ‘first bio-information crisis’. A key figure in resolving this crisiswas the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus (1707-1788). Thispaper will focus on Linnaeus’s day-to-day working routines on thebasis of manuscript material held...

We present a theoretical framework and empirical strategy to measure the causal effect ofinterim feedback on individuals’ performance. Our identification strategy exploits a naturalexperiment in a leading UK university where different departments have historically differentrules on the...

This paper – a companion to Iain Crawford's and my earlier evidence to the SelectCommittee (Barr, 2002a,b,c,d,e; Crawford, 2002) – offers a strongly supportive assessmentof the strategy in the White Paper (Department for Education and Skills, 2003).[...]

This paper puts forward a strategy for achieving two objectives in higher education –improved access and increased quality – about which there is unanimous agreement.[...]

Area-based polices have become a significant part of the new LabourGovernment’s approach to tackling social exclusion. This paper reviewsthe long-running debate about whether area-based policies can make asignificant impact on poverty and social exclusion. There is a strongtradition of...

This paper studies a dynamic model of crises with timing frictions that combines the mainaspects of Morris and Shin (1998) and Frankel and Pauzner (2000). The usual arguments forexistence and uniqueness of equilibrium cannot be applied. It is shown that the model has aunique equilibrium within...

This paper develops an approach to studying how bias in favor ofone party due to the pattern of electoral districting affects policy choice.We tie a commonly used measure of electoral bias to the theory of partycompetition and show how this affects party strategy in theory. Theusefulness of the...