The article aims to present and discuss estimates of levels of human and social capital in Italy’s regions over the long term, i.e. roughly from the second half of the nineteenth century up to the present day. The results are linked to newly available evidence for regional value added in order...

This paper provides a historical look at how the multilateral trading system has coped with the challenge of shocks and shifts. By shocks we mean sudden jolts to the world economy in the form of financial crises and deep recessions, or wars and political conflicts. By shifts we mean slow-moving,...

Reserving in general insurance is often done using chain-ladder-type methods. We propose a method aimed at situations where there is a sudden change in the economic environment affecting the policies for all accident years in the reserving triangle. It is shown that methods for forecasting...

Motivated by features of low latency data in finance we study in detail discrete-valued Levy processes as the basis of price processes for high frequency econometrics. An important case of this is a Skellam process, which is the difference of two independent Poisson processes. We propose a...

I will argue for a simpler, fairer, more fiscally responsible and flexible form of university funding and student support. This system is designed to encourage a diverse higher education sector where high quality provision can flourish. The main points of the new system are: 1. Make student...

We derive the parameter restrictions that a standard equity market model implies for a bivariate vector autoregression for stock prices and dividends, and we show how to test these restrictions using likelihood ratio tests. The restrictions, which imply that stock returns are unpredictable, are...

Medical knowledge – defined broadly to include both its private and public forms – has been the driving force behind the historical transitions that have raised life expectancy in modern Europe. Advances in knowledge, rather than better nutrition (particularly the escape from caloric...

This paper is a first attempt to garner the theory and evidence on the political economy of the first wave of financial liberalisation during the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and of its demise after World War I. Not everyone gained from the process of globalisation (of trade, labour,...

Between the 1870s and World War II, falls in world shipping costs and Western industrialisation gave rise to export-led Southeast Asian growth and specialization in a narrow range of primary commodity exports. A linked development was the emergence of a few dominant Southeast Asian urban...