Much of the short-run movement in energy demand in the UK appears to be seasonal, and the contribution of long-run factors to short-run forecasts is slight. Nevertheless, using a variety of techniques, including a recently developed test that is applicable irrespective of the orders of...

We consider optimal investment behavior for a firm facing both technological and economic uncertainty, in the context of a research project with unpredictable outcomes. The optimal investment strategy, in the form of a pair of trigger points for investment and abandonment, is derived. As in...

Previous research has shown that if countries ”merge”, (i.e. move to centralized policy choices) the effect is to reduce lobbying. However empirical evidence suggests that this is not the case. This paper explains the empirical evidence in a two-jurisdiction political economy model of public...

This paper analyses the behaviour of contestants in one of the most popular TV gameshows ever to estimate risk aversion. This gameshow has a number of features that makes it well suited for our analysis: the format is extremely straightforward, it involves no strategic decision-making, we have a...

We consider a general equilibrium local public goods economy in which agents have two distinguishing characteristics. The first is 'crowding type', which is publicly observable and provides direct costs or benefits to the jurisdiction (coalition or firms) the agent joins. The second is taste...

This paper examines the determinants of profitability in 90 U.K. manufacturing industries over the period 1983-86. It considers the importance of labour market characteristics in determining profits and how their inclusion in a profitability equation affects the concentration-margins...

Although there is a very large literature on the links between farm size and farm productivity in Indian agriculture there is virtually none that discusses the influence of farm size on technical efficiency. In this paper we try to fill this gap. We use panel data on a large number of farms for...

The idea of optimal policy design using an explicit loss function was a natural consequence of the development of econometric models of the macroeconomy. Since the economic theory underlying these was, at first the comparative static Keynesian model the techniques used tended to be static also....