The focus of inference in Bayesian cointegration analysis has recently shifted from the cointegrating vectors to the cointegrating space. Two recent papers - Strachan and Inder (2004) and Villani (2004) - present uniform priors for the cointegrating space using different specifications for...

This paper considers the informational efficiency of the UK owner-occupied housing market over the period 1991-2001. Original small-area, monthly, house price index series are developed from raw housing transactions observations for a number of UK counties and cities. These series are then...

We study the technological pre-conditions for a cost-minimizing choice of technique in the presence of government emission targets on by-products of production. Whether a by-product is a desirable commodity or an undesirable pollutant is determined endogeneously as part of the price-quantity...

This paper extends Stahl (1988) by modelling a sequential price competition among intermediaries when their expected revenue per sale is affected by consumers’s default. If this revenue is non-monotonie with the asking price, theWalrasian outcome may not be an equilibrium and demand rationing...

This paper analyses the signal uncertainty implicit in the communications of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee (MPC). Unlike previous studies, which seek to construct a qualitative uncertainty index that heavily relies on subjective interpretations of key expressions, we limit...

This paper developes a theoretical model to analyse the impact of uncertainty about the true state of the economy on monetary policy. The theoretical model is tested on US data since the early 1980s. Our estimates suggest that the effect of uncertainty on interest rates was most marked in 1983,...

We investigate the question of whether sophistication in risk management fosters banking stability. We compare a simple banking system in which an average rating is used with a sophisticated banking system in which banks are able to assess the default risk of entrepreneurs individually. Both...

The theoretical literature on industrial organization has been argued that firms hold excess capacity to deter entry. However, empirical analysis did not provide much support to this hypothesis. In this paper we show that the dominant firms may hold excess capacity not for entry deterrence but...

Studying behaviour in economics, sociology, and statistics often involves fitting models in which the response variable depends on a dummy variable (also known as a regime switch variable) or in which the response variable is observed only if a particular selection condition is met. In either...

This paper compares profits and consumer surplus under non-cooperation and collusion in the product market when the firms have the option for R&D before production. We show that whether R&D investment would be higher under noncooperation or product market collusion depends on the R&D...