Publications by Author: Robinson%2C%20James%20A.

American Economic Review, 90, 126-130

Per capita income in many sub–Saharan African countries, such as Chad and Niger, is less than 1/30th of that of the United States. Most economists and social scientists suspect that this is in part due to institutional failures that stop these societies from adopting the best technologies. A particularly interesting historical example comes from the diffusion of railways in the 19th century. While railways are regarded as a key technology driving the Industrial Revolution, there were large lags in their diffusion. For example, in 1850 the United States had 14,518 km of track, Britain 9,797 km, and Germany 5,856 km; in the Russian and Hapsburg empires there were just 501 km and 1,357 km, respectively (all date from Brian R. Mitchell [1993]). Why do societies, as in this example, fail to adopt the best available technologies?

We study the implications of the trade–off between child quality and child quantity for the efficiency of the rate of population growth. We show that if quantity and quality are inversely related then, even in the case of full altruism within the family, population growth is inefficiently high, if the family does not have, or does not choose to use, compensating instruments (for example, bequests or savings are at a corner). In non–altruistic models this trade–off certainly generates a population problem. We therefore prove that the repugnant conclusion is not only repugnant, it may be inefficient. Moreover, we cannot expect intra–family contracting to resolve the inefficiency since it involves contracts which are not credible.

The most convincing theory of comparative economic development asserts that it is institutions – the way societies are organized – that are the fundamental cause of countries? development of underdevelopment. To attain prosperity, a country needs to accumulate physical and human capital and create and adopt technology. Whether or not it does so is determined by the incentives that stem from the institutional environment.

During the nineteenth century most Western societies extended voting rights, a decision that led to unprecedented redistributive programs. We argue that these political reforms can be viewed as strategic decisions by the political elite to prevent widespread social unrest and revolution. Political transition, rather than redistribution under existing political institutions, occurs because current transfers do not ensure future transfers, while the extension of the franchise changes future political equilibria and acts as a commitment to redistribution. Our theory also offers a novel explanation for the Kuznets curve in many Western economies during this period, with the fall in inequality following redistribution due to democratization.

International Economic Review, 40, 209-230

This paper provides a theory of strikes as part of a constrained efficient enforcement mechanism for an implicit contractual agreement. A firm possessing contemporaneously private information about demand engages in an enduring relationship with its work force. If the information becomes perfectly observable subsequently, then, modulo discounting, the first–best is implementable, but strikes are always off the equilibrium path. If the observations of the workforce are imperfect strikes occur in equilibrium. The dynamic contracting problem is modeled as a repeated game with imperfect monitoring. The equilibrium exhibits production inefficiency and incomplete insurance to mitigate the efficiencies caused by strikes.

Policy Reform, Volume 1, 1–45

Recent growth theory fails to provide a convincing account of underdevelopment in terms of economic "fundamentals". As a result, many accounts cite "bad" government policy (including the failure to support appropriate institutions) as a casual factor behind stagnations. Yet this perspective is hard to understand from the viewpoint of welfare economics. This paper studies theories of endogenous policy which can possibly account for such bad policy. I stress three (interrelated) general intuitions about causes of bad policy which apply, irrespective of the type of political regime: 91) inability to use transfers to separate efficiency and distribution, (2) inability to commit, (3) the close connection between development and changes in the distribution of political power. I particularly stress the ability (or inability) of these theories to explain cross country differences.

This paper demonstrates that the introduction of imperfect competition into the labor market can solve the problem isolated by Jones and Manuelli (Journal of Economic Theory, 1992, 58, 171–197), and Boldrin (Journal of Economic Theory, 1992, 58, 198–218), that in economies with convex technologies and finitely lived agents, real wages may not grow fast enough for unbounded growth to be sustained. I show that if wages are determined by a bargaining solution, and if the bargaining power of the workforce is sufficiently high (if they appropriate a sufficiently large proportion of rents), then growth is unbounded. Moreover, the growth path generated by such an economy may improve the welfare of all generation apart from the initial old.