In universities all over the world, hiring and promotion committees regularly hear the argument: “this is important work because it is about to appear in prestigious journal X”. Moreover, those who allocate levels of research funding, such as in the multi-billion pound Research Assessment...

Periodic models for seasonal data allow the parameters of the model to vary across the different seasons. This paper uses the components of UK consumption to see whether the periodic autoregressive (PAR) model yields more accurate forecasts than non-periodic models, such as the airline model of...

The role of asymmetric information and the incentive to acquire information is considered for a monopolistically competitive economy. To focus on nominal rigidities, the money stock is the only state variable, and it is shown how informational problems can cause nominal price rigidities. Under...

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...