Market share objectives are prominent in many industries, especially where managers pay much attention to league table rankings. This paper explores the strategic rationale for giving managers incentives based on market share in an oligopoly competing in strategic substitutes. Moreover, the...

In this paper we use agency theory to study the active role of the chief executive in the formulation of corporate strategy. Unlike traditional applications of agency theory, we allow the agent (CEO) to play a role in defining the parameters of the agency problem. We argue that CEOs will have an...

Why is it that couples who have a son or whose last child is a son earn higher conditional income?  To solve this curious case we tell a detective story: evidence of a phenomenon to be explained, a parade of suspects, a process of elimination from the enquiry, and then the denouement.  Given...

This paper revisits the issue of the intra-household of education with the recently available India Human Development Survey which refers to 2005 and covers both urban and rural areas.  In addition to the traditional Engel method, the paper utilizes a Hurdle model to disentangle the decision to...

Pakistan has very large gender gaps in educational outcomes. While this suggests that girls may receive lower educational expenditure allocations than boys within households, this has never convincingly been tested. This paper investigates whether the intra-household allocation of educational...

The move to a more market-oriented economy is associated with evidence of increased inequality in the incomes earned by men and women. The context of our study of this question is the recent large-scale reform of the inefficient state sector, which has caused layoffs of urban workers that...

The rate of cost pass-through exceeds 50% under strategic delegation of decision-making to managers with sales revenue contracts - regardless of the number of firms in the industry and demand curvature.  This contrasts sharply with profit-maximization, for which cost pass-through can take on...

Tenured public officials such as judges are often thought to be indifferent to the concerns of the elctorate and, as a result, potentially lacking in discipline but unlikely to pander to public opinion.  We investigate this proposition empirically using data on promotion decisions taken by...

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 conduct a field experiment to investigate employers' trust in workers.  A sample of real entrepreneurs and workers from urban Ghana are respectively assigned to the roles of employers and employees.  Employers have the option to hire (trust) an employee, who can in turn choose whether to...