This paper presents a wage series for unskilled English women workers from 1260 to 1850 and compares it with existing evidence for men.  Our series cast light on long run trends in women's agency and wellbeing, revealing an intractable, indeed widening gap between women and men's remuneration...

We reconsider the job design theory of Holmstrom and Milgrom (1991), to include career concerns considerations. When reputations are considered, discretion may play a more integral part of the incentive scheme. It can be a useful instrument to enhance incentives and prevent the adverse selection...

Using data from a randomized control trail in Sri Lanka, this paper explores whether cash and in-kind grants helped microenterprises approach the productivity level of SMEs.  The paper first estimates production functions and subsequently treatment effects on TFP levels.  Most significantly,...

Despite the widely recognised importance of the manufacturing industry for successful development few studies investigate this sector in cross-country analysis. We fill this gap in the literature by analysing manufacturing production across a large number of developing and developed economies....

The labour productivity differentials between manufacturing firms in Ghana and South Korea exceed those implied by macro analysis.  Median value-added per employee is nearly 40 times higher in South Korea than Ghana.  The most important single factor in explaining this difference is the...

In this paper we ask how technological differences in manufacturing across countries can best be modeled when using a standard production function approach.  We show that it is important to allow for differences in technology as measured by differences in parameters.  Of similar importance are...

This study provides statistical evidence that Russian rural/urban wages diverged substantially during the industrialization of Russia in the late nineteenth century. However, over time both the variation declined and integration somewhat increased as rural labour responded to new opportunities....

This paper investigates structural change in Argentina between 1900 and 1973.  It has been argued that trade policy under import-substituting industrialization disfavoured agriculture and led to a "technological lag" in the sector, and that this explains agriculture's relative decline during a...