Overseers’ vested interests played an important role in shaping local poor relief provision under the Old Poor Law. In the industrial town of Bolton the Relief Order books for the 1820s reveal an unusual emphasis upon the payment of paupers’ rent by the parish. This...

We consider cointegration tests in the situation where the cointegration rank is decient. This situation is of interest in nite sample analysis and in relation to recent work on identication robust cointegration inference. We derive asymptotic theory for tests for cointegration rank and for...

Two diculties arise in the estimation of AB models: (i) the criterion function has no simple analytical expression, (ii) the aggregate properties of the model cannot be analytically understood. In this paper we show how to circumvent these diculties and under which conditions ergodic models can...

The apc package includes functions for age-period-cohort analysis based on the canonical parametrisation of Kuang et al. (2008). The package includes functions for organizing the data, descriptive plots, a deviance table, estimation of (sub-models of) the age-period-cohort model, a plot for...

In a non-stationary world subject to structural breaks, where model and mechanism differ, equilibrium-correction models are a risky device from which to forecast. Equilibrium shifts entail systematic forecast failure, and indeed forecasts will tend to move in the opposite direction to the data....

We revisit the concept of unpredictability to explore its implications for forecasting strategies in a non-stationary world subject to structural breaks, where model and mechanism differ. Six aspects of the role of unpredictability are distinguished, compounding the four additional mistakes most...

Parallel computation has a long history in econometric computing, but is not at all wide spread. We believe that a major impediment is the labour cost of coding for parallel architectures. Moreover, programs for specific hardware often become obsolete quite quickly. Our approach is to take a...

OLS estimation of an impulse-indicator coefficient is inconsistent, but its variance can be consistently estimated. Although the ratio of the inconsistent estimator to its standard error has a t-distribution, that test is inconsistent: one solution is to form an index of indicators. We provide...

This paper is a first attempt to garner the theory and evidence on the political economy of the first wave of financial liberalisation during the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and of its demise after World War I. Not everyone gained from the process of globalisation (of trade, labour,...