China’s local government debt (LGD) has recently become the focus of economic policy debates. However, information about LGD and its impact on economic growth in the Chinese economy is scarce. This paper attempts to present an empirical investigation of the impact of China’s LGD on economic...

The paper examines the range of national experiences of communist rule in terms of the aspiration to ‘overtake and outstrip the advanced countries economically’. It reviews the causal beliefs of the rulers, the rise and fall of their economies (or, in the case of China, its continued rise),...

We model a learning dynamic in which players imitate and innovate. Of interest is to question whether Nash equilibrium play emerges, and if so, the role that imitation plays in this emergence. Our main result provides a general class of coordination games for which approximate Nash equilibrium...

In this paper the authors calculate OCA-indexes for industrial countries in an effort to estimate the benefit-cost ratio of adopting a common currency. The results correspond to the estimation of Bayoumi and Eichengreen (1997b) and show that the ranking of the economies suitable to form a...

This paper investigates the evolution of electricity prices for domestic customers in the UK following the introduction of competition. The empirical analysis is based on a panel data set containing detailed information about electricity supply prices over the period 1999 to 2006. The analysis...

This paper analyzes the spatial structure of goods market integration in Russia, characterizing regions into three states: (a) integrated, (b) not integrated but trending toward integration, and (c) not integrated and not trending toward integration. Using time series of the cost of a staples...