Local government in the United Kingdom is undergoing a period of transformational change. The Modernising Local Government white paper “In Touch with the People” (DETR 1998) has instructed local councils to obtain best value in the delivery of local services and this includes re-examining...

This paper considers modelling the behaviour of prices in the English and Welsh wholesale electricity Pool since the creation of this spot market in 1990. The process turns out to be nonlinear and a logistic smooth transition autoregressive model is fitted and shown to be superior to a linear...

This article attempts to investigate empirically the strength of intracity football club support and seeks to test the commonly held belief among the sports community that supporters will not switch allegiance between city rivals very readily. To test this phenomenon, data on the attendances of...

The volatility of spot prices has been a notable feature of the English and Welsh Electricity Pool since its formation in 1990. This study investigates the possibility that the volatility of spot prices is strongly affected by the functioning of the contract market for electricity. This paper...

Prior to nationalisation British gas undertakings were faced with a choice of three different regulatory schemes linking the price charged for gas with the amount of dividend that could be paid. The three schemes, the maximum price system, the sliding scale and the basic price system possessed...

From 1920 until nationalization, privately owned gas companies in Britain were regulated under one of three systems: the maximum price, the sliding scale, or the basic price system. In effect, the industry was the subject of a remarkable experiment in regulation. Hitherto, there has been no...

Using a database of the movements of more than 2,000 professional footballers in the top two divisions of the English Football League between 1969 and 1995, this article examines the impact on talent distribution via the movement of players after abolition of gate revenue sharing in 1983. We...