The EU protects agriculture and manufacturing through its commercial policies, namely its tariffs, its non-tariff barriers and the Common Agricultural Policy. By leaving the EU the UK would be able to abandon the EU’s protectionist system in favour of free trade combined with transitional...

Recent work has exposed the extent of EU protectionism within the single market Customs Union. If the UK leaves the EU customs union for unilateral free trade, as a small country within the world market, it will therefore make gains according to the standard trade model. Should it do so, trade...

We investigate the impact of a policy reform, which introduced free formal personal care for all those aged 65 and above, on caregiving behaviour. Using a difference-indifferences estimator, we estimate that the free formal care reduced the probability of co-residential informal caregiving by...

We study the labour market wage outcomes of university graduates by course (i.e. by subject and institution) in the UK using the Labour Force Survey (LFS). We match this data to a measure of course "selectivity" (the mean standardised admission scores at the course level) using data on high...

We fit the logistic function, the reduced form of epidemic behaviour, to the data for deaths from Covid-19, for a wide variety of countries, with a view to estimating a causal model of the covid virus' progression. We then set out a structural model of the Covid virus behaviour based on...

Some pro-Brexit MPs will not vote for the government's proposed Withdrawal Agreement because of its fine print: they think it will be written in indelible tablets of law that we can never change. But they forget that sovereign states will not indefinitely stay in treaties that do not suit them,...

We examine the empirical evidence bearing on whether UK trade is governed by a Classical model or by a Gravity model, using annual data from 1965 to 2015 and the method of Indirect Inference which has very large power in this application. The Gravity model here differs from the Classical model...

This paper establishes the ability of a Real Business Cycle model to account for real exchange rate behaviour, using UK data. We show that a productivity simulation is capable of explaining initial real appreciation with subsequent depreciation to a lower steady state. The model is tested by the...

The UK has been a net debtor over the past two decades and the sterling exchange rates are sensitive to any chaos that might occur in the Financial market. This paper examines the importance of the inter-national financial imperfections in the sterling exchange rate dynamics. We build a small...