Motivated by features of low latency data in finance we study in detail discrete-valued Levy processes as the basis of price processes for high frequency econometrics. An important case of this is a Skellam process, which is the difference of two independent Poisson processes. We propose a...

I will argue for a simpler, fairer, more fiscally responsible and flexible form of university funding and student support. This system is designed to encourage a diverse higher education sector where high quality provision can flourish. The main points of the new system are: 1. Make student...

We derive the parameter restrictions that a standard equity market model implies for a bivariate vector autoregression for stock prices and dividends, and we show how to test these restrictions using likelihood ratio tests. The restrictions, which imply that stock returns are unpredictable, are...

Medical knowledge – defined broadly to include both its private and public forms – has been the driving force behind the historical transitions that have raised life expectancy in modern Europe. Advances in knowledge, rather than better nutrition (particularly the escape from caloric...

The size of adverse selection and moral hazard eects in health insurance markets has important policy implications. For example, if adverse selection eects are small while moral hazard eects are large, conventional remedies for ineciencies created by adverse selection (e.g., mandatory insurance...

This study investigates the impact of joint-stock banks on the rationalisation of the British interwar steel industry. A new panel data set of steel firm characteristics covering 1920 to 1938 is used to document rationalization and bank involvement, including interlocking directorships, with...

Bad ethics can make for bad economic outcomes. Bad ethics are defined hedonically as the infliction of pain on others for private advantage. The infliction of pain is often justified by ‘Just World Theories’, which state that everyone gets what they deserve. Market liberalism (and its...

Although Nigeria's Benin region was a major rubber producer in 1960, the industry faltered before 1921. I use labour scarcity and state capacity to explain why rubber did not take hold in this period. The government was unable to protect Benin's rubber forests from over-exploitation. Plantations...

Housing was the major domestic priority of all postwar UK governments. By 1970 the physical conditions of British housing had been transformed; by the 1990s seventy per cent of households in England owned their own homes. Yet in 2012 there were still parts of many cities that deserved labeling as...