High frequency financial data allows us to learn more about volatility, volatility of volatility and jumps.  One of the key techniques developed in the literature in recent years has been bipower variation and its multipower extension, which estimates time-varying volatility robustly to...

India's development experience over the past fifty years suggests that the increasing importance of the services sector deserves analysis.  The literature on structural change has emphasised changing patterns of demand as an explanation for the increasing importance of the services sector.  In...

This paper looks at the impact of education on household economic welfare in Sri Lanka over twenty years from 1985 to 2006 using five cross section household survey datasets.  Applying quantile regression techniques the analysis finds that the incremental value to household welfare shows a...

This paper provides an overview of school education in India. Firstly, it places India`s educational achievements in international perspective, especially against countries with which it is now increasingly compared such as BRIC economies in general and China in particular. India does well...

We identify necessary and sufficient conditions under which a finite data set of price vectors and consumption bundles can be rationalized by a weakly separable utility function.  Our result could be understood as a generalization of Afriat's Theorem.

Consider a finite data set of price vectors and consumption bundles; under what conditions will there be a weakly separable utlity function that rationalizes the data?  This paper shows that rationalization in this sense is possible if and only if there exists a preference order on some finite...

Low enrolment and educational wastage are serious problems in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly in rural areas of Ethiopia where participation in formal education is extremely poor. An aspect of both problems is late entry to primary school, which has dire consequences for educational attainment,...

One of the main elements of the current reform of electricity trading in the UK is the change from a uniform price auction in the wholesale market to discriminatory pricing. We analyse this change under two polar market structures (perfectly competitive and monopolistic supply), with demand...

The paper proves the existence of equilibrium in nonrenewable resource markets when extraction costs are non-convex and resource storage is possible.  Inventories flatten the consumption path and eliminate price jumps at the end of the extraction period.  Market equilibrium becomes then...

This paper analyses the impact of cost competitiveness and technology on export performance using a very rich panel datset of 12 manufacturing industries in 14 OECD countries for the period between 1970 and 1992.