This paper presents evidence on how farmers’ decisions to adopt a new crop, sunflower,relate to the adoption choices of farmers in their social network of family and friends. Weshow that the relationship is shaped as an inverse-U, suggesting social effects are positivewhen there are few...

Empirical studies on information communication technologies (ICT) typically aggregate the“information” and “communication” components together. We show theoretically and empirically thatthese have very different effects on the empowerment of employees, and by extension on wageinequality....

Industrial delicensing which began in 1985 in India marked a discrete break from apast of centrally planned industrial development. Similar liberalization episodes are takingplace across the globe. We develop a simple Schumpeterian growth model to understand how…rms respond to the entry threat...

This paper uses recently digitised samples of apprentices and masters in London and Bristol to quantify the practice of apprenticeship in the late 17th century. Apprenticeship appears much more fluid than is traditionally understood. Many apprentices did not complete their terms of indenture;...

This paper examines the effect of a new technology on a labour-intensive service. Comparing primal and dual TFP-growth with final-year social savings, we find that, between 1900 and 1938, motion pictures increased entertainment output (measured in spectator-hours) by at least nine percent...

This article examines the hypothesis that in the “Third Reich”, bureaucratic agencies engaged in economic policies competed with each other. First, a model of competition is constructed whose predictions are then compared with actual political processes in Nazi Germany. This shows that the...

We find little support for the Schumpeterian hypothesis of a positiverelationship between market power and innovation in 1950’s Britain eventhough many economists and policymakers accepted it at the time. Pricefixingagreements were very widespread prior to the 1956 RestrictivePractices Act and...

The travel of small facts (such as data) across geographicallocations and disciplines is increasingly regulated by the private andpublic sponsors of digital databases. My analysis focuses on thecontrast between the strategies supported by the public and privatesectors in governing bioinformatic...

This paper reviews some issues relevant to the delivery of public services. Itreviews some of the debates and flags some issues that are significantworldwide, especially in Africa. It emphasises how the debate has movedalong in terms of defining the relative responsibilities of the public...

This paper proposes a simple framework to study incentives and matching in the marketfor teachers. The framework is used to investigate the consequences of introducing incentivepay for teachers when contracts have both a matching and an incentive effect. Our analysissuggests that school...