Our Beijing-based laboratory experiment investigated gender differences in competitive choices across different birth-cohorts experiencing during their crucial developmental-age different institutions and social norms. To control for general time trends, we use Taipei counterpart subjects with identical original Confucian traditions. Our findings confirm that exposure to different institutions/...

What have been the effects of technological change on production in OECD economies? Are there any systematic differences between the countries in the Asia Pacific Region and other OECD countries? Estimates of aggregate and biased technological change for 18 OECD countries are generated, treating each economy as a trading economy with multiple outputs as well as multiple inputs. Productivity gro...

The labour economics literature on signalling assumes workers know their own abilities. Well-settled experimental evidence contradicts that assumption: in the absence of hard facts, subjects are on average overcon ̄dent. First we show that in any equilibrium of any signalling model, overcon ̄dence cannot make players better o®. In order to obtain more detailed predictions, we then introduce a spe...

This paper uses a multi-period economic-environmental Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) modelling framework to analyse local sustainability policy issues. Our focus is the small, open, labourconstrained regional economy of Jersey. The case of Jersey is of particular interest for two main reasons. The first is the unusually low degree of geographical labour market integration for such a small...

A view has emerged which sees Adam Smith’s main contribution to economics in terms of his equilibrium theory. This paper argues that equilibrium economics was neither Smith’s main contribution nor his chief concern. It is true that Smith made a few observations which may be construed as equilibrium economics in some loose sense. For example, his observation that the market price of a commodity ...

This paper investigates whether and in what sense the west German wage structure has been ‘rigid’ in the 1990s. To test the hypothesis that a rigid wage structure has been responsible for rising low-skilled unemployment, I propose a methodology which makes less restrictive identifying assumptions than some previous related work. I find that the relative stability of educational wage premia was ...

Field evidence suggests that people’s work morale depends on those of their co-workers. We are interested in understanding the behavioural logic of such “social interaction effects”. We design a three-person gift-exchange experiment where workers can observe each others’ effort levels and adjust their own effort if they so wish. Our design avoids the “reflection problem” (Manski 1993) which pla...

This working paper reviews general changes in EU labour markets, with reference to the four major EU countries, France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom. It sheds light on the possible links between foreign trade and employment in manufacturing industries, using data for a panel of 40 industries over the period 1970-1995. The estimates do not provide evidence of significant effects of impo...

In principle knowledge is doubtless indivisible, but in practice we have to divide it into small finite tracts, with plenty of overlap, in which each of us cultivates his respective plot with whatever tools he is most adept at using. It is inevitably a messy business, but as with all bureaucratic arrangements for the division of labour, it is occasionally rewarding to try to think through (and,...