Given that virtually all British passenger train services were franchised out over the period1995-7, and many have now been franchised for a second time, Britain should provide anexcellent opportunity to study the impact of franchising passenger rail services. Moreover,since several different...

London is one of the world's most popular destinations and visitors contribute approximately £14.9 billion of expenditure to the city every year. Its tourism and events sectors are growing and over the last few years London has received more visitors than ever before. However, detailed accounts...

Which groups of elected officials should be in charge of decisions about the imposition of lockdowns and other social distancing rules? People throughout the UK have debated this issue since the start of the pandemic. When central government, local governments, and devolved administrations all...

This book explores how festivals and events affect urban places and public spaces, with a particular focus on their role in fostering inclusion. The 'festivalisation' of culture, politics and space in cities is often regarded as problematic, but this book examines the positive and negative ways...

In this paper we first consider alternative measures of efficiency. We explain why simple partial productivity measures are inadequate as the basis of overall measures of efficiency, and outline two alternative approaches. The first is technical efficiency - the degree to which output is...

With 70 percent of its population living in coastal areas and low-lying deltas, Vietnam is exposed to many natural hazards, including river and coastal flooding. These hazards are expected to worsen due to climate change, and the impacts of any change in hazard magnitude may be particularly...

The staff working paper 'Stranded Irrigation Assets' (Roper, H., Sayers, C. and Smith, A.) was released on 28 June 2006. Prior to the National Water Initiative (NWI), irrigation authorities imposed restrictions on outward trade of water entitlements partly to protect remaining irrigators against...

We examine the macroeconomic and term-premia implications of monetary policy uncertainty shocks. Using Eurodollar options, we employ the VIX methodology to measure implied volatility about future short-term interest rates at various horizons. We identify monetary policy uncertainty shocks using...