This paper explores the procurement of public buildings in local authorities in the UK under the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) and its consequences for small and medium sized enterprises. Following an outline of the development of PFI in the UK, the paper explains the peculiarities of local...

This paper explores the procurement of public buildings in local authorities in the UK under the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) and its consequences for small and medium sized enterprises. Following an outline of the development of PFI in the UK, the paper explains the peculiarities of local...

Using data from Germany, Japan, UK, and the U.S., we explore possible threshold cointegration in nominal short- and long-run interest rates with corresponding inflation rates. Traditional cointegration implies perfect mean reversion in real rates and hence confirms the Fisher hypothesis....

This paper questions traditional approaches for testing the day-of-the-week effect on stock returns. We propose an alternative approach based on the closure test principle introduced by Marcus, Peritz and Gabriel (1976), which has become very popular in Biometrics and Medical Statistics. We test...

Recent attention has focused on the UK's productivity gap in the retail sector. Figure 1 shows an estimate of labour productivity in retail across countries, using output per hour worked. The UK lies well behind the US, France and Germany. Reynolds at al (2005) contribute to this debate by...

The aim of this paper is to analyze and estimate salient characteristics of unemployment dynamics. Movements in unemployment are viewed as "chain reactions" of responses to labour market shocks, working their way through systems of interacting lagged adjustment processes. In the context of...