Economists wishing to analyse road congestion and road pricing have usually relied on link-based speed-flow relationships. These may provide a poor description of urban congestion, which mainly arises from delays at intersections. Using the simulation model SATURN, we investigate the second-best...

This paper models UK stock market returns in a smooth transition regression (STR) framework. We employ a variety of financial and macroeconomic series that are assumed to influence UK stock returns, namely GDP, interest rates, inflation, money supply and US stock prices. We estimate STR models...

What are the theoretical determinants of intra-firm trade between identical countries? This paper focuses on firm and sectorial characteristics to state that this pattern of trade can be associated to low level of intermediate goods trade costs compared with those on final goods and markups...

At the macroeconomic level, the persistence of innovation allows sustainable growth. But does growth come from the same set of firms or originate always from different innovators? On this point, the assumptions of endogenous growth models differ and innovation persistence at the macroeconomic...

In this paper, we examine a relatively novel form of gambling, index (or spread) betting, that mirrors (and indeed overlaps with) practices in conventional financial markets. In this form of betting, a number of bookmakers quote a bid-offer spread about the result of some future event, and...

The UK and the US have experienced both rising skill premia and rising employment of skilled workers since the 1980s. These trends are typically interpreted as concurrent shifts of relative skill supplies and demands, and the demand shifts are attributed to skill biased technological change or...

This paper attempts, for the first time for the UK, to analyse the earnings of homosexuals and test for the possible existence of sexual orientation discrimination. Homosexuals are identified as individuals living with "same sex partners". Using twenty quarters of the LFS, we identify 630...

A common finding in the empirical literature on the validity of purchasing power parity (PPP) is that it holds when tested for in panel data, but not in univariate (i.e. country specific) analysis. The usual explanation for this mis-match is that panel tests for unit roots and cointegration are...

We examine the impact of housing capital gains on savings behaviour during the 1990s British housing market cycle using microdata from the British Household Panel Survey and county-level house price data. We condition the models on household real financial capital gains using Family Resources...

This paper discusses the 'timeless perspective' optimisation concept with reference to a much-studied forward-looking rational expectations model. We establish that this policy, as usually described, is not always superior to a time consistent alternative on the basis of the stochastic...