A growing literature relies on natural experiments to establish causal effects in macroeconomics. In diverse applications, natural experiments have been used to verify underlying assumptions of conventional models, quantify specific model parameters, and identify mechanisms that have major effects on macroeconomic quantities but are absent from conventional models. We discuss and compare the us...

Article history: Received 5 August 2009 Available online 23 November 2010 In this paper we apply a model of early industrialization to the case of New Zealand and Uruguay in 1870–1940. We show how differences in agricultural institutions may have produced different development paths in two countries which were similar under many respects. While in New Zealand the active role of the Crown in reg...

South Africa simultaneously lost more than 890,000 jobs and increased the number of skilled workers from 1989 to 1999. We argue this is the consequence of well-documented acute apartheidera distortions which led to a current coordination failure where (i) firms are locked into a mostly skill-intensive technology where they have very little demand for semi-skilled and unskilled labor, and (ii) t...

This paper uses the adoption and invention of the spinning jenny as a test case to understand why the industrial revolution occurred in Britain in the eighteenth century rather than in France or India. It is shown that wages were much higher relative to capital prices in Britain than in other countries. Calculation of the profitability of adopting the spinning jenny shows that it was profitable...

the prevalence of spinal cord injury (sci) is about 2.5 million in the worldwide and more than 130,000 new injuries reported each year. regeneration in the cns versus the pns is very different from the other tissues and many factors can prevent regeneration in pns and specially cns. previous researches demonstrated that regeneration of cns can inhibit by inhibitory molecules and glial scar. the...

autobiographical memory, that is, our memory for personal life experiences, is integral to our sense of self. however, the experience of trauma can create distortions in how our memories are bought to mind. in particular, trauma can produce an overgeneral memory style, which relates to the development of both ptsd and depression. however, theory states that immediately following a traumatic eve...

In a previous study, we found that some O serotypes of Serratia marcescens, as defined by agglutination tests, were not based on lipopolysaccharide (LPS) O antigens. We developed a dot enzyme immunoassay with a high degree of LPS specificity and tested 104 distinct clinical strains. Only 7 of the 24 existing O antigens were found in more than one strain: O12/O14 (30.8% of strains examined), O21...

Ca₃Nb(Ga1-xAlx)₃Si₂O14 (CNGAS) single crystals with various Al concentrations were grown by a micro-pulling-down (µ-PD) method and their crystal structures, chemical compositions, crystallinities were investigated. CNGAS crystals with x = 0.2, 0.4 and 0.6 indicated a single phase of langasite-type structure without any secondary phases. In contrast, the crystals with x = 0.8 and 1 included some...

In every developed country, the economic transition from pre-industrial stagnation to modern growth was accompanied by a demographic transition from high to low fertility. Even though the overall pattern is repeated, there are large cross-country variations in the timing and speed of the demographic transition. What accounts for falling fertility during the transition to growth? To answer this ...

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 Mincerian return to skills which differ by a factor of three between Ghana and South Korea. There is no signifi...