This paper reviews the part played by economists in organizing the British third-generation mobile-phone licence auction that concluded on 27 April 2000. It raised £22 1/2 billion ($34 billion or 2 1/2% of GNP) and was widely described at the time as the biggest auction ever. We discuss the...

This paper provides limit distribution results for power variation, that is sums of powers of absolute increments, for certain types of time-changed Brownian motion and $\alpha $-stable processes. Special cases of these processes are stochastic volatility models used extensively in financial...

Recent decades have seen a considerable expansion of global trade and a simultaneous decline in inflation volatility. This paper investigates whether greater openness to trade helps achieve inflation stability. Using panel data for a sample of developing and industrial countries over the period...

This paper argues that developing economies may face a trade-off between specializaing according to existing comparative advantage (in low-technology goods), and entering sectors in which they currently lack a comparative advantage, but may acquire such an advantage in the future as a result of...

This paper examines the operation of an emissions trading scheme (ETS) in a Cournot oligopoly. We study the impact of the ETS on industry output, price, costs, emissions, and profits. In particular, we develop formulae for the number of emissions permits that have to be freely allocated to firms...

The notion of cointegration has lead to a renewed interest in the identification and estimation of structural relations among economic time series, a field to which Henri Theil has made many pioneering contributions. This paper reviews the different approaches that have been put forward in the...

In this paper we review some recent work on limit results on realised power variation, that is sums of powers of absolute increments of various semimartingales. A special case of this analysis is realised variance and its probability limit, quadratic variation. Such quantities often appear in...

The growth process for a technological leader is different from that of a follower. While followers can grow through imitation and capital deepening, a leader must undertake original research. This suggests that as the gap between the leader and the follower narrows, the follower must undertake...

Stochastic volatility models present a natural way of working with time-varying volatility. However the difficulty involved in estimating these types of models has prevented their wide-spread use in empirical applications. In this paper we exploit Gibbs sampling to provide a likelihood framework...