This paper argues that skill formation is a life-cycle process and develops the implications of this insight for Scottish social policy. Families are major producers of skills, and a successful policy needs to promote effective families and to supplement failing ones. Targeted early...

This paper studies the properties of second-best optimal policy in a standard general equilibrium model of growth augmented with renewable natural resources. The government chooses its policy instruments (the income tax rate and the allocation of collected tax revenues between public investment...

We examine how a shift of bargaining power within households operating in a competitive market environment affects equilibrium allocation and welfare. If price effects are sufficiently small, then typically an individual benefits from an increase of bargaining power, necessarily to the detriment...

This paper examines the main drawbacks of technical analysis. Although this is widely used by practitioners, from an academic perspective it can only be seen as a form of "voodoo finance". In particular, it runs into the following pitfalls: Subjectivity; Doubtful assumptions; Unjustified...

This paper provides estimates of persistence in historical UK data on life expectancy applying fractional integration methods to both an annual series from 1842 to 2019 and a 5-year average from 1543 to 2019. The results indicate that the former exhibits an upward trend and is persistent but...

This paper uses a seasonal long-memory model to capture the behaviour of the US Industrial Production Index (IPI) over the period 1919Q1-2022Q4. This series is found to display a large value of the periodogram at the zero, long-run frequency, and to exhibit an order of integration around 1. When...

This paper introduces a new modelling approach that incorporates nonlinear, exponential deterministic terms into a fractional integration model. The proposed model is based on a specific version of Robinson's (1994) tests and is more general that standard time series models, which only allow for...

The recent Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted global supply chains and led to large increases in shipping costs. This paper first provides shipping cost mean and uncertainty measures by using the endogenous regime switching model with dynamic feedback and interactions developed by Chang et al....

This paper applies a recently developed method (Inoue and Rossi, 2021) to estimate functional inflation expectations and ex-ante real interest rate shocks, and then examines their macroeconomic effects in the context of a Functional Vector Autoregressive model with exogenous variables...

We develop an endogenous growth model to quantify how permanent structural policy changes that enhance the fiscal policy mix, markets' functioning, and public institutions' quality affect long-term growth and welfare. The reforms include increased public investment, reduced market power through...