This paper explores the ability of common risk factors to predict the dynamics of US and UK interest rate swap spreads within a linear and a non-linear framework. We reject linearity for the US and UK swap spreads in favour of a regime-switching smooth transition vector autoregressive (STVAR)...

This paper considers transitional dynamics of consumption and physical capital in Lucas-type growth models. We find that when the ratio of physical to human capital is sufficiently high, it is optimal for both consumption and physical capital to fall for a finite period and then rise along their...

To model inter-individual externalities and analyze the associated compensation issue, Ju and Borm (2005) introduces a new game-theoretic framework, primeval games, and proposes, from a cooperative perspective, three compensation rules as solution concepts for primeval games: the marginalistic...

The estimation of models involving discrete mixtures is a common practice in econometrics, for example to account for unobserved heterogeneity. However, the literature is relatively uninformative about the measurement of the precision of the parameters. This note provides an analytical...

This paper examines the post-litigation history of a celebrated and much-cited English nuisance case of 1858 concerning sewage pollution of the river Tame. This legal case is a classic citation purporting to illustrate the absence in English nuisance law of a ‘‘social benefit’’ defence...

Economic policy decisions are often informed by empirical economic analysis. While the decision-maker is usually only interested in good estimates of outcomes, the analyst is interested in estimating the model. Accurate inference on the structural features of a model, such as cointegration, can...

This paper develops a political economy model of multiple unemployment equilibria to provide a theory of an endogenous natural rate of unemployment using a nonlinear threshold model for a number of OECD countries. The theory here sees the natural rate and the associated path of unemployment as a...

The literature on technology licensing has ignored the importance of market power of the input supplier. In this paper we examine the impact of licensing in the downstream industry when the firms in the upstream industry have market power. We show that licensing in the downstream industry can...

This paper analyses the behaviour of TV gameshow contestants to estimate risk aversion. We are able to show that the gameshow participants are broadly representative of the population as a whole. The gameshow has a number of features that makes it well suited for our analysis: the format is...

This paper develops a political economy model of multiple unemployment equilibria to provide a theory of an endogenous natural rate of unemployment. This model is applied to the UK and the US interwar period which is remembered as the decade of mass unemployment. The theory here sees the natural...