The evaluation of economic forecasts is a substantial and important aspect of economic research, and a considerable part of such evaluation is performed by comparing competing forecasts. This thesis focuses on the development of statistical procedures in order that reliable comparison of...

In this paper we develop a simple procedure which delivers tests for the pres-ence of a broken trend in a univariate time series which do not require knowledgeof the form of serial correlation in the data and are robust as to whether theshocks are generated by an I(0) or an I(1) process. Two...

In the evaluation of economic forecasts, it is frequently the case that comparisons are made between a number of competing predictors. A natural question to ask in such contexts is whether one forecast encompasses its competitors, in the sense that they contain no useful information not present...

Being able to correctly characterise an observed time series into its separate difference stationary and trend stationary regimes, should they exist, has important implications for effective model building and forecasting in economics and finance. Existing ratio-based statistics test the null...

The paper presents results of the FP7 Econ-Welfare Project “Assessing the socio-economic consequences of measures promoting good animal welfare”. The paper illustrates the economic consequences at the farm level of indicative improvements in animal welfare conditions for pigs and cattle and...

ABSTRACT Studies of how exchange rate volatility affects aggregate trade flows implicitly assume a uniform response across individual sectors. This is highly unlikely given that the responsiveness of trade to exchange rate fluctuations could depend on the biological, marketing, and economic...

The Prebisch-Singer hypothesis is often popularised as implying a declining long-run trend in primary commodity prices relative to manufactures, and conventional datasets to examine the hypothesis typically commence at the beginning of the 20th century. Theoretical rationales include the...