This paper applies the concept of trade creation and diversion to immigration into the EU-15 in the 1980s and 1990s. In particular, the 1990s process of East-West integration, culminating in the May 2004 enlargement, could potentially create immigration from the new member countries and at the...

On 8 October 2008 the UK Government announced a far-reaching plan to restore financial stability, protect depositors and re-invigorate the flow of credit to businesses and individuals in the UK. The £400 billion bailout plan embraced three elements: a massive expansion in emergency liquidity...

Using a new set of measures of concentration of trade, I suggest that the opening up of trade to date has been greatly exaggerated. At least judging on the basis of trade concentration, agriculture and service sectors should barely be seen as globalised at all. Contrary to other recent studies,...

Regulatory standards, such as on health and safety, may be subject to strategic bias when a country engages in trade. Where regulation is to correct an undersupply of quality by a monopolistic industry, if regulators do not cooperate and …rms can vary standards, there will be a tendency to...

The merger of police services in the UK has been suggested on the grounds that efficiency improvements will be possible. This paper applies a public good model of the police service to evaluate the potential efficiency gains from mergers of police services in England and Wales. We construct a...

This paper examines the implications of increasing globalisation of stock market ownership on the economics of protection. Current data on European stock exchanges indicate that over 30 per cent of the stock market is foreign-owned in most cases, a large increase on a couple of decades ago.This...

We study firms' preferences towards intellectual property rights (IPR) regimes in a North-South context, using a simple duopoly model where a 'North' and a 'South' firm compete in a third market. Unlike other contributions in this field, we explicitly introduce the South's capability to...

Using more than 10 million on-line fares, we study the determinants of yearly fares’ changes in June 2002-June 2005. We verify whether airlines took advantage, after the Euro introduction, of potential inflationary pressures by increasing their fares more in routes to Eurozone nations. The...

Using evidence from an original dataset of more than 12 million fares, this study sheds light on two issues relating to the pricing behaviour of the main European airlines: 1) the extent to which an airline’s dominant position at the origin airport, at the route and the city-pair level affects...

This paper examines how the duration of wage contracts influences innovation incentives, wages and employment. We find that wages are non-monotone in the duration of wage contracts. Furthermore, a positive and one-to-one relation between innovation and union utility exists and both attain their...