The International Monetary Fund is the world’s premier international financial institution with 184 member countries and active programmes in a significant number of them at any one time. The Fund attracts a great deal of attention, much of it critical. But the discussion is often polemic in...

Against a background of increased decentralisation in the structure of wage decision making, we analyse the effects of unions on the dispersion and persistence of pay settlements over the medium term using a longitudinal data set covering British private sector establishments over the period...

IMF supported programs have conventionally been assessed by examining their effects on intermediate variables and final outcomes. More recently greater attention has been paid to implementation on the assumption that in order to work programs need to be implemented. Empirical studies have begun...

For many years analysis of IMF conditionality overlooked the extent to which it was implemented. However, more recently increasing attention has been paid to implementation. Theoretical contributions have focused on the importance of special interest groups, but empirical evidence has failed to...

This paper examines pay determination in the labor market of a professional team sport hitherto neglected by researchers in the U.S. Using data on 361 Major League Soccer (MLS) players for one recent league season, mean and median regression models are exploited to investigate salary...

We assess the power of artificial neural network models as forecasting tools for monthly inflation rates for 28 OECD countries. For short out-of-sample forecasting horizons, we find that, on average, for 45% of the countries the ANN models were a superior predictor while the AR1 model performed...

I examine the propensity of Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee (BoEMPC) members to cast dissenting votes. In particular, I compare the type and frequency of dissenting votes cast by socalled insiders (members of the committee chosen from within the ranks of bank staff) and outsiders...

Economic theory suggests several plausible reasons why firms may employ hurdle rates for capital investment appraisal that differ from discount rates. Using a sample of business units from the PIMS data bank of North American companies we find that hurdle rates are frequently below and also...

We consider the effects the child care market, child care vouchers, early childhood education programs, and welfare reforms have on welfare recipients in their transition from welfare to work. Specifically, we are interested in determining which factors encourage single mothers to move directly...

For the first time, we test for effects of liability on hospital care using measures of current perceptions of litigation risk at hospital level; in particular, the risk-sharing arrangements agreed between hospitals and their insurers. GMM and ML estimators are used to allow for possible...