We study optimal redistributive policies in a frictional model of the labor market. Ex-ante heterogeneous agents choose how much to search in a labor market characterized by a matching technology. We first derive efficiency results and provide policies to decentralize the optimal allocation. We then solve the mechanism design problem of a government with redistributive motives and limited infor...

This paper has four related themes. It demonstrates that Marx’s Communism in its first or Socialist phase would recognize the essential inequality of labour on grounds of efficiency and growth. It offers an explanation for the apparent paradox that Marx and Engels championed a fully-fledged control system notwithstanding appreciation of the allocation functions of a competitive market system. I...

BACKGROUND Health personnel retention in remote areas is a key health systems issue wordwide. To deal with this issue, since 2002 the government of Burkina Faso has implemented a staff retention policy, the regionalized health personnel recruitment policy, aimed at front-line workers such as nurses, midwives, and birth attendants. This study aimed to describe the policy's development, formulati...

We adopt a time-varying cointegration test to discriminate among different empirical studies claiming to find a stable Euro Area money demand equation. A time-invariant relation explaining real balances is rejected by data, even when accounting for housing, financial and labour markets. Conversely, an international portfolio allocation approach provides stabilization. In particular, internation...

The paper provides a fairly comprehensive examination of recent empirical work on discrimination within economics. The three major analytical approaches considered are traditional regression analysis of outcomes, paired testing or audits, and finally analysis of performance where higher group performance suggests that a group has been treated disfavorably. The review covers research in the labo...

For economic development to succeed in Africa in the next 50 years, African agriculture will have to change beyond recognition. Production will have to have increased massively, but also labour productivity, requiring a vast reduction in the proportion of the population engaged in agriculture and a large move out of rural areas. The paper questions how this can be squared with a continuing comm...

Who’s on First? Listing Authors by Relative Contribution Trumps the Alphabet David A. Lake1 Political science as a discipline lacks any convention on the order in which authors should be listed in co-authored publications. As a result, the order of author’s surnames currently provides no information to other scholars, hiring and promotion committees, and other reviewers about the relative contr...

A computational model of a simple commodity economy is examined and a theory of the relationship between commodity values, market prices and the efficient division of social labour is developed. The main conclusions are: (i) the labour value of a commodity is an attractor for its market price; (ii) market prices are error signals that function to allocate the available social labour between sec...

An allocation model of workers differentiated by their field of study is developed to test whether international differences in the wage structure can be explained by differences in labour demand and supply in each country. The model explicitly takes into account the effects of supply and demand shifts on the allocation structure to disentangle country specific differences in the recruitment fo...

In New Keynesian models with sticky wages, the quantity of labor is solely determined by the demand side. Unions with monopsony power set the wage above what it takes to make agents work. If wages are sticky, however, a change of circumstances may make the demand for labor higher than agents’ willingness to work. Because of the simplicity of log-linearization, the literature implicitly assumes ...