A seller wishes to prevent the discovery of rival offers by its prospective customers.  We study sales techniques which serve this purpose by making it harder for a customer to return to buy later after a search for alternatives.  These include making an exploding offer, offering a "buy-now"...

For some observers, the dramatic growth of the services sector in India reflects rapid strides made by educated professionals.  Some others see it as the expansion of an employer of last resort.  Given this heterogeneity, the object of the paper is to analyze the nature of employment being...

This paper uses novel data on trade mark activity of UK manufacturing and service sector firms to investigate whether trade marks improve the profitability and productivity of firms. We first analyse Tobin`s q, the ratio of stock market value to book value of tangible assets. We then investigate...

This paper investigates discount pricing, the common marketing practice whereby a price is listed as a discount from an earlier, or regular, price.  We discuss two reasons why a discounted price - as opposed to a mearly low price - can make a rational consumer more willing to purchase the...

We identify anthropogenic contributions to atmospheric CO2 measured at Mauna Loa using a statistical automatic model selection algorithm (Autometrics).  We find that vegetation, temperature and other natural factors alone cannot explain the trend or the variation in CO2 growth.  Industrial...

Here we assume that the logarithmic asset price is given by a semimartingale. Jacod (2006) has derived an infeasible central limit theorem for the realised variance in such a general framework. However, here we focus on constructing a feasible limit theorem. We propose a new estimator for the...

This paper shows that the behaviour of inventories is not symmetrical and that their modelling requires more than just a linear regression. Models of inventory behaviour are described and symmetric and non-symmetric-error-correction models are formulated which divide the changes in production...

It is widely believed that regional labour markets in the USA are highly flexible, so that employment shocks have only transitory effects on joblessness since induced migration quickly offsets much of the initial impact. However time-series analysis of the response to shocks is very sensitive to...

This paper describes some recent advances and contributions to our understanding of economic forecasting. The framework we develop helps explain the findings of forecasting competitions and the prevalence of forecast failure. It constitutes a general theoretical background against which recent...

We demonstrate major flaws in the statistical analysis of Beenstock, Reingewertz and Paldor (2012), discrediting their initial claims as to the different degrees integrability of CO2 and temperature.