CASEpaper

Does The Scottish Child Payment Weaken Work Incentives?

Suzanna Nesom, Kitty Stewart and Emma Tominey

The Scottish Child Payment (SCP), introduced in 2021, provides cash transfers for families with children receiving Universal Credit (UC) or related benefits. The eligibility link to UC can create a potential cliff-edge a...Read more...

Journal Article

Journal of Labor Economics:

The Search for Good Jobs: Evidence from a Six-Year Field Experiment in Uganda

Oriana Bandiera, Vittorio Bassi, Robin Burgess, Imran Rasul, Munshi Sulaiman and Anna Vitali

There are 420 million young people in Africa today, and only one in three has a regular salaried job. We study how two common labor market interventions-vocational training and matching-affect the job search behavior of ...Read more...

Development Discussion Paper

Making the invisible hand visible: Managers and the allocation of workers to jobs

Virginia Minni

Why do managers matter for firm performance? This paper provides evidence of the critical role of managers in matching workers to jobs within the firm using the universe of personnel records from a large multinational fi...Read more...

CASEpaper

Making Work Pay? The labour market effects of capping child benefits in larger families

Mary Reader, Kate Andersen, Ruth Patrick, Aaron Reeves and Kitty Stewart

Child benefits are typically paid on a per-child basis, without restrictions on family size. In this paper we generate unique evidence on the effects of capping child benefits by family size by examining the introduction...Read more...

CASEreport

What is the role of housing associations in providing intermediate and market rented housing?

Ellie Benton and Anne Power

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CASEpaper

When and why might choice in public services have intrinsic (dis)value?

Aveek Bhattacharya

Governments in several countries have sought to increase choice in public services. Proponents claim the value of such choice is both instrumental (it improves outcomes) and intrinsic (choice is valuable in itself). Yet ...Read more...

Development Discussion Paper

Market Structure and Borrower Welfare in Microfinance

Jonathan de Quidt, Thiemo Fetzer and Maitreesh Ghatak

Motivated by recent controversies surrounding the role of commercial lenders in microfinance, we analyze borrower welfare under different market structures,considering a benevolent non-profit lender, a for-profit monopol...Read more...

Development Discussion Paper

Can Market Failure Cause Political Failure?

Madhav S, Aney, Maitreesh Ghatak and Massimo Morelli

We study how inefficiencies of market failure may be further amplified by political choices made by interest groups created in the inefficient market. We take an occupational choice framework, where agents are endowed he...Read more...

Development Discussion Paper

Trade and the Skill Premium Puzzle with Capital Market Imperfections

Roberto Bonfatti and Maitreesh Ghatak

An interesting puzzle is that trade liberalization in the 1980s and 1990s has been associated with a sharp increase in the skill premium in both developed and developing countries. This is in contrast with neoclassical t...Read more...

Economics of Industry Paper

Second-Hand Markets and Collusion by Manufacturers of Semidurable Goods

Pasquale Schiraldi

The focus of the present work is to study the impact of the second-hand market the collusive behavior. I analyze firms’ preferences for having an active second-hand market and whether policies (i.e. leasing policy, buy-b...Read more...

CASEpaper

The Impact of Policy Change on Job Retention and Advancement

Richard Dickens and Abigail McKnight

This paper examines the impact of the Working Families Tax Credit (WFTC) on employment retention and advancement. The WFTC, which replaced Family Credit in October 1999, supplemented earnings of low paid workers living i...Read more...

CASEpaper

Assimilation of Migrants into the British Labour Market

Richard Dickens and Abigail McKnight

This paper discusses the extent to which migrants to Britain have been assimilated into the workforce. Migration into Britain has increased over the last 25 years, with a big increase in inflows in recent years. The pape...Read more...

CASEpaper

Changes in earnings inequality and mobility in Great Britain 1978/9-2005/6

Richard Dickens and Abigail McKnight

This paper examines changes in earnings inequality and mobility between 1978/9 and 2005/6 using a unique dataset that includes both those with secure patterns of employment and a wider group who experience periods withou...Read more...

International Studies Paper

Bond Markets and Banks in Inter-War Japan

Makoto Kasuya

Issues of bonds increased in inter-war Japan, the main investors in bonds being banks because demand for loans declined in this period. Banks that were more tolerant of risks (that is, whose capital ratio was higher) mad...Read more...

Econometrics Paper

Estimating Quadratic Variation Consistently in the Presence of Correlated Measurement Error

Ilze Kalnina and Oliver Linton

We propose an econometric model that captures the e¤ects of market microstructure on a latent price process. In particular, we allow for correlation between the measurement error and the return process and we allow the m...Read more...

Economics of Industry Paper

Strategic Patenting and Software Innovation

Michael Noel and Mark Schankerman

Strategic patenting is widely believed to raise the costs of innovating, especially in industries characterised by cumulative innovation. This paper studies the effects of strategic patenting on R&D, patenting and market...Read more...

CASEpaper

Labour Market Disadvantage amongst Disabled People: A longitudinal perspective

John A. Rigg

Considerable cross-sectional evidence has highlighted the lower employment rates and earnings amongst disabled people in Britain. But very little is known about the progression of disabled people in employment. This stud...Read more...

Political Economy and Public Policy Paper

The Costs of Remoteness: Evidence from German Division and Reunification

Stephen J. Redding and Daniel M. Sturm

This paper exploits the division of Germany after the Second World War and the reunification of East and West Germany in 1990 as a natural experiment to provide evidence of the importance of market access for economic de...Read more...

Economics of Industry Paper

Identifying technology spillovers and product market rivalry

Nicholas Bloom, Mark Schankerman and John Van Reenen

Support for many R&D and technology policies relies on empirical evidence that R&D “spills over” between firms. But there are two countervailing R&D spillovers: positive effects from technology spillovers and negative ef...Read more...

Economics of Industry Paper

'Inferring Conduct under the Threat of Entry: The Case of the Brazilian Cement Industry.'

Alberto Salvo

This paper demonstrates that when an industry faces potential entry and this threat of entry constrains pre-entry prices, cost and conduct are not identified from the comparative statics of equilibrium. In such a setting...Read more...

Economics of Industry Paper

Market Share Dynamics and the ‘Persistence of Leadership’ Debate

John Sutton

This paper introduces a novel analysis of the classic “persistence of leadership” question, and applies it to a newly constructed dataset for Japanese manufacturing. The analysis rests on an appeal to an empirical “scali...Read more...

Development Economics Paper

Gender Discrimination and Growth: Theory and Evidence from India

Berta Esteve-Volart

Gender inequality is an acute and persistent problem, especially in developing countries. This paper argues that gender discrimination is an inefficient practice. We model gender discrimination as the complete exclusion ...Read more...

Econometrics Paper

A Quantilogram Approach to Evaluating Directional Predictability

Oliver Linton and Yoon-Jae Whang

In this note we propose a simple method of measuring directional predictability and testing for the hypothesis that a given time series has no directional predictability. The test is based on the correlogram of quantile ...Read more...

Theoretical Economics Paper

Strategic Liquidity Supply and Security Design

Bruno Biais and Thomas Mariotti

We study how securities and trading mechanisms can be designed to optimally mitigate the adverse impact of market imperfections on liquidity. Asset owners seek to obtain liquidity by selling their claims on future cash-f...Read more...

Theoretical Economics Paper

Law Enforcement under Incomplete Law: Theory and Evidence from Financial Market Regulation

Katharina Pistor and Chenggang Xu

This paper studies the design of law-making and law enforcement institutions based on the premise that law is inherently incomplete. Under incomplete law, law enforcement by courts may suffer from deterrence failure, def...Read more...

CASEpaper

Informal Employment in Countries in Transition: A conceptual framework

Sabine Bernabe

In the past few years the informal sector in countries in transition has increasingly become the focus of research, public policy and the media. The term ¿informal sector¿ has been used to describe an extremely wide spec...Read more...

Economics of Industry Paper

Submarkets, Shakeouts and Industry Life-Cycle

Jian Tong

Some recent empirical findings suggest that there are intrinsic links between the statistical regularities regarding cohort survival patterns, the persistence of firm turnover, and shakeout during an industry life-cycle....Read more...

Development Economics Paper

Valutation and Evaluation: Measuring the Quality of Life and Evaluating Policy

Partha Dasgupta

This paper is about measuring social well-being and evaluating policy. Part I is concerned with the links between the two, while Parts II and III, respectively, are devoted to the development of appropriate methods of me...Read more...

Development Economics Paper

Financial Intermediation, Variability and the Development Process

Luis Carranza and Jose E. Galdon-Sanchez

In this paper we have built a model of financial intermediation that explains the GDP variability pattern of an economy during the development process. In our model, per capita is more volatile in the middle-income econo...Read more...

Economics of Industry Paper

Firm Size Distribution: Testing the 'Independent Submarkets Model' in the Italian Motor Insurance Industry

Luigi Buzzacchi and Tommaso Valletti

This paper tests the presence of multiple independent submarkets in the Italian motor insurance industry. Independence is motivated by administrative boundaries among provinces and by further locational reasons. We find ...Read more...

Development Economics Paper

Credit in Rural India: A Case Study

Jean Drèze, Peter Lanjouw and Naresh Sharma

This paper presents a case study of credit transactions in Palanpur, a north Indian village. Drawing on detailed informtion from all borrowers and lenders in the village, we examine a number of issues related to the func...Read more...

Economics of Industry Paper

Price Competition and Market Structure: The Impact of Restrictive Practices Legislation on Concentration in the UK (Revised version pubished in Journal of Industrial Economics, vol.48 (March 2000), pp.1-26)

George Symeonidis

This paper examines the impact of firms' conduct on market structure. It studies the evolution of concentration in UK manufacturing following the abolition of cartels using a theoretical framework based on Sutton's theor...Read more...

Economics of Industry Paper

Cartel Policy, Non-Price Competition and Market Structure: Theory and Evidence from the UK (Revised version published in Economica, vol.67 (August 2000), pp.437-456)

George Symeonidis

This paper examines the impact of price competition on advertising/R&D expenditure and market structure. General theoretical results are derived which restrict the space of possible outcomes regarding the behaviour of co...Read more...

Economics of Industry Paper

Game Theoretical Models of Market Structure

John Sutton

This paper reviews the recent literature on game-theoretic models of market structure and their empirical implementation....Read more...

Economics of Industry Paper

Gibrat's Legacy

John Sutton

This paper traces the time series (?Growth of Firms?) tradition in the study of market structure and looks at how recent studies on entry and the size distribution of firms have modified thinking in this area....Read more...

Economics of Industry Paper

One Smart Agent

John Sutton

This paper proposes an equilibrium concept for a class of games in which players make irreversible costly decisions; these games have been widely used in the recent I.O. literature. The equilibrium concept is defined, no...Read more...

Economics of Industry Paper

The Size Distribution of Businesses, Part I: A Benchmark Case

John Sutton

This paper examines the evolution of a skew distribution of firm sizes from the viewpoint of the ?Bounds? approach to market structure. It confines attention to the role played by non-strategic factors (statistical indep...Read more...

Theoretical Economics Paper

Roads to Equality: Wealth Distribution Dynamics with Public-Private Capital Complementarity

Francisco H.G. Ferreira

This paper proposes a model of wealth distribution dynamics with a capital market imperfection and a production function where public capital is complementary to private capital. A unique invariant steady-state distribut...Read more...

Economics of Industry Paper

Endogenous Industry Structure in Vertical Duopoly

Maija Halonen

This paper examines integration decisions of successive duopolists. It is shown that qualitatively the same pattern of integration emerges whether there is Cournot or Bertrand competition in the input market. The degree ...Read more...

Japanese Studies Programme Paper

The Learning Process and the Market: The Japanese Capital Goods Sector in the Early Twentieth Century

Tetsuro Nakaoka

Professor Tetsuro Nakaoka, formerly of Osaka University, and now of the Faculty of Management, Osaka University of Economics, gave a seminar on Japanese industrial development at the Suntory-Toyota Centre during 1992. Al...Read more...

Economics of Industry Paper

Revisions of Investment Plans and the Stock Market Rate of Return

Mark Schankerman

This paper explores the sources of uncertainty that cause firms to revise their capital investment plans and the stock market to revise its valuation of those firms. A simple method is developed to decompose the uncertai...Read more...

Economics of Industry Paper

Product Innovation and Persistence of Leadership: Theory with Evidence from the Semiconductor Industry

Harald Gruber

This paper sets out to model the evolution of market shares in the semiconductor industry. The time profile of market shares for different firms in this industry has shown a striking regularity over successive generation...Read more...

Economics of Industry Paper

Modelling Price Behaviour in the European Car Market: 1970-1985

Yves Mertens

This paper is concerned with the determinants of car prices in four European countries: Belgium, France, Germany and the United Kingdom, over the period 1970-1985. The main focus of the study lies in explaining the level...Read more...

Japanese Studies Programme Paper

Wage Differentials in Japan: 1958-85

Michio Morishima

The market is a place where people behave quite relentlessly. If one person is selling a particular commodity at a higher price than others, no one will buy that commodity from him, however virtuous or merciful he is kno...Read more...