We present new empirical evidence on trend robustness and end-point issues, utilising the macroeconomic data set investigated in McKelvie and Hall (2012). We consider the relative merits of non-robust Hodrick-Prescott (HP) and robust loess (LOcal regrESSion) trend filtering methods, and assess...

Rational allocation of limited public resources is critical to achieve the stated aims of government programmes. Here, we focus on the regional allocation of public spending for disaster risk reduction in Bangladesh as a case study to identify the rationale that guides public funding...

The standard way in which disaster damages are measured involves examining separately the number of fatalities, of injuries, of people otherwise affected, and the financial damage that natural disasters cause. Here, we propose a novel way to aggregate measures of disaster impact, which aims to...

Why do people save? A strand of the literature has emphasized the role of ‘precautionary’ motives; i.e., private agents save in order to mitigate unexpected future income shocks. An implication is that in countries faced with more macroeconomic volatility and risk, private saving should be...

We quantify the ‘permanent’ socio-economic impacts of the Great Hanshin-Awaji (Kobe) earthquake in 1995 by employing a large-scale panel data set of 1,719 wards from Japan over three decades. In order to overcome a fundamental difficulty of identifying the counterfactual, i.e., the Kobe...

We tabulate and measure the burden of disasters on the Pacific Island Countries (PICs) by aggregating and comparing the data found in the two global datasets on disaster impacts. We show that the most commonly used dataset greatly underestimates the burden of disasters for the Pacific islands....

We provide an introduction to a model of social inequality dynamics. Because capital is distributed less equally than labour, we propose that that one of the main forces driving income inequality is the ratio of factor shares. In this paper we give an easy proof to show that this ratio is driven...

This paper examines whether changes in New Zealand income inequality can be attributed to the shares of national income taken by capital and labour. Data on income inequality aggregates both capital income (rents, interest, profits) and labour income (wages and salaries). It is possible that...

The standard way in which disaster damages are measured involves examining separately the number of fatalities, of injuries, of people otherwise affected, and the financial damage that natural disasters cause. Here, we implement a novel way to aggregate these separate measures of disaster impact...

An immediate consequence of the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) is the absence of auto-correlation of the return series of the financial prices and the exclusion of excess profitability made by any (active) trading strategy. However, the precondition for the validity of EMH, which assumes that...