This paper argues that much interpretation of standard poverty data is flawed. It is common to analyse poverty data broken down by household or economic status. Implicitly it is assumed that people move between different states (for example, single, married, children, no children, etc.) for...

Modigliani's Life Cycle Hypothesis (LCH) predicts that demographic variables should play a significant role in our understanding of the relationship between consumption and income. Understanding this relationship is particularly important given the demographic changes expected in the next few...

Standard macroeconomic models suggest that the 'great ratios' of consumption to output and investment to output should be stationary. The joint behaviour of consumption, investment and output can then be used to measure trend output. We adopt this approach for the USA and UK, and find support...

This paper investigates the impact of luck, defined as global economic growth, and competence, defined as the difference between domestic and world growth, on voting in general elections since 1960. The vote of incumbent parties of the right is found to be sensitive to luck, whereas that of...

The prevalence of prices ending in 99 cents is explained as the result of rational consumers rounding prices up. Monopolists are shown to be harmed by this practice whereas consumers may gain. The model is compared with two other models: Basu's (1997) model and one which assumes consumers round...

Standard matching models of unemployment assume that workers and job flows are identical. This is in stark contrast to empirical evidence that job flows in fact only account for a fraction of worker ßows, that unemployment exits only account for a fraction of hires and that these fractions vary...

Due to its ability to solve all main problems associated with digital goods, Digital Right Management is the favourite option used by companies to tackle piracy. The aim of this article is to discuss the consequences of DRM for consumers, firms and society. The rationales of DRM are discussed...

We use microeconomic data to explore the effects of a changing age-structure on the UK's aggregate personal savings rate. Our findings suggest that changes to the population's age structure age have had detectable, sustained, but, relative to the yearly changes observed in the savings rate over...

King (1997) develops a framework for assessing four monetary regimes: an optimal state-contingent rule; a non-contingent rule; pure discretion; and a Rogoffian conservative central banker. Using this framework we show (a) that King is wrong to claim that it implies that an optimally-conservative...

Several recent papers have argued that trade and financial development may be linked, either for political economy reasons, or because foreign competition and exposure to shocks lead to changes in the demand for external finance. In this paper we use the cross-country and time-series variation...