This paper analyzes how Japan financed its World War II occupation of Southeast Asia, the transfer of resources to Japan, and the monetary and inflation consequences of Japanese policies. In Malaya, Burma, Indonesia and the Philippines, the issue of military scrip to pay for resources and...

Adam Smith rejected Mandeville’s invisible-hand doctrine of ‘private vices, publick benefits’. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments his model of the ‘impartial spectator’ is driven by not by sympathy for other people, but by their approbation. Approbation needs to be authenticated, and in...

Western governments typically pay out some 30 percent of GDP for social purposes. This is financed by taxation on a pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) basis. How efficient are these transfers, and can market or other mechanisms do it better? The problem arises since no individual stands alone. During the...

At the beginning of the First World War, the British imposed a blockade against Germany intending to prevent all imports from entering the country. Germans began to call the British naval action the Hungerblockade, claiming that it seriously damaged the well-being of those on the home front,...

At the start of the Second World War, British policies restricted rubber planting in Nigeria's Benin region. After Japan occupied Southeast Asia, Britain encouraged maximum production of rubber in Benin. Late in the war, officials struggled with the planting boom that had occurred. The war was a...

Modern economic growth first emerged in Britain about the time of the Industrial Revolution, with its cotton textile factories, urban industrialization and export orientated industrialization. A period of economic growth, industrial diversification and export orientation preceded the Industrial...

The paper examines the behavior of the British economy 1890-1913 by using a newly assembled quarterly data set. This provides a basis for estimating a small macroeconomic model, which can be used to explore the relationship between the policy responses of the Bank of England and the course of...

We propose a new, easy-to-implement, class of payment rules, “Reference Rules,” to make core-selecting package auctions more robust. Small, almost riskless, profitable deviations from “truthful bidding” are often easy for bidders to find under currently-used payment rules. Reference...

I show that the fiscal position of the UK means it will be very hard for the next government to allow the undergraduate fee cap to increase beyond the rate of inflation. The funding position of the higher education sector can be improved by the government removing the interest rate subsidy it...

We investigate the properties of the composite likelihood (CL) method for (T ×N_T ) GARCH panels. The defining feature of a GARCH panel with time series length T is that, while nuisance parameters are allowed to vary across N_T series, other parameters of interest are assumed to be common. CL...