What is the impact of modern transportation technology on long-run economic change in poor countries with high trade costs?  Rail construction in colonial Sub-Saharan Africa provides a natural experiment: 90% of African rail-road lines were built before independence, in a context where...

Expansion in mobile phone coverage has improved access to information throughout the developing world, particularly within sub-Saharan Africa.  The existing evidence suggests that information technology has improved market efficiency and reduced consumer prices for certain commodities.  There...

We report the short-term results from a randomized evaluation of a mobile phone literacy and numeracy program (Project ABC) in Niger, in which adult literacy students learned how to use mobile phones as part of a literacy and numeracy class.  Students in ABC villages showed substantial gains in...

Traditionally, the scholarly journal market operates so that research institutions are charged high prices and the wider public is often excluded altogether, while authors can usually publish for free and commercial publishers enjoy high profits.  Two forms of open access regulation can...

The paper analyses the effects of the 1990 Brazilian trade liberalization on the total factor productivity, market share and profits of a sample of 349 large manufacturing firms. A panel data production function analysis.

When a supply and demand model is recursive, with errors uncorrelated across the two equations, ordinary least square (OLS) is the recommended estimation procedure. Supply to a daily fish market is determined by the previous night`s catch, so this would appear to be a good example of a recursive...

This paper is concerned with the nature of economic growth in 19 manufacturing industries between 1970-92. There is substantial heterogeneity (both across sectors and time) in rates of growth of value-added, hours worked, labour productivity and Total Factor Productivity during the sample...

The impact of profitability on capital accumulation, neglected in conventional accounts, is confirmed by a cross sectional analysis of the post-war experience of manufacturing in OECD economies and this is consistent with a body of time-series and firm level studies.

Competition authorities all over the world worry that integration between search engines (mainly Google) and publishers could lead to abuses of dominant position.  In particular, one concern is that of own-content bias, meaning that Google would bias its rankings in favor of the publishers it...

This paper develops an asymmetric price setting oligopoly model of store opening and closure decisions in the UK supermarket industry which is estimated using a survey of consumer choices and a dataset of store characteristics. The model is used to examine the strategic local entry and exit...