Using the international investment regime as its point of departure, the paper applies notions of bounded rationality to the study of economic diplomacy. Through a multi-method approach, it shows that developing countries often ignored the risks of bilateral investment treaties (BITs) until they...

When doing growth accounting, should we use ex post or ex ante measures of user costs to calculate the contribution of capital? The answer, based on a simple model of temporary equilibrium, is that ex post is better in theory. In practice researchers usually calculate ex post user costs by...

We explain the issue of the decision rule of the EU's Council of Ministers. We outline, in as non-technical fashion as we can, the mathematical theory (due to L S Penrose) that addresses this sort of issue. We assess the decision rule prescribed in the Nice Treaty as well as that included in the...

his paper deal with aggregation of AR(1) micro variables driven by a common and idiosyncratic shock with random coefficients. We provide a rigorous analysis, based on results on sums of r.v.'s with a possibly finite first moment, of the aggregate variance and spectral density, as the number of...

We study the impact of large cross-sections of contemporaneous aggregation of GARCH processes and of dynamic GARCH factor models. The results crucially depend on the shape of the cross-sectional distribution of the GARCH coefficients and on the cross-sectional dependence properties of the...

I set out a new method for estimating true (Konüs) PPPs. Household consumption per head deflated by these PPPs answers the question: by how much must the average expenditure per head of poor country A be increased to enable the typical inhabitant of A to enjoy the same utility level as the...

This paper proposes an empirically feasible method for correcting the path-dependence bias of chain indices of the cost of living. Chain indices are discrete approximations to Divisia indices and it is well known that the latter are path-dependent: the level of a Divisia index is affected not...

This paper sets out a general algorithm for calculating true cost-of-living indices or true producer price indices when demand is not homothetic, i.e. when not all expenditure elasticities are equal to one. In principle, economic theory tells us how we should calculate a true cost-of-living...

This paper examines the relationship between immigration and crime in a setting where large migration flows offer an opportunity to carefully appraise whether the populist view that immigrants cause crime is borne out by rigorous evidence. We consider possible crime effects from two large waves...

In this paper we look at links between police resources and crime in a different way to the existing economics of crime work. To do so we focus on a policy intervention - the Street Crime Initiative - that was introduced in England and Wales in 2002. This allocated additional resources to some...