Agricultural land prices in many developed countries rose and then fell dramatically over a relatively short period of time in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Most of the models in the literature that describe the dynamic behaviour of agricultural land prices suggest that these sharp price...

This paper uses UK data to estimate the returns to schooling. We address the endogeneity of schooling by exploiting the experimental nature of two changes in the minimum school leaving age to instrument eduction. The corrected estimates of the return to education indicate the presence of a large...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the ability of parameter instability tests in regressions with 1(1) processes to discriminate between changes in the cointegrating relationship and changes in the marginal distribution of the regressors. Using annual data for the G-7 countries and the...

We study how competitive pressure influences the make-or-buy decision that oligopolistic firms face between producing an intermediate component in-house or purchasing it from a domestic supplier. We model outsourcing as a bilateral relationship in which the supplier undertakes...

Over the past decade the energy and communications markets in Ireland, which were traditionally the preserve of State owned monopolies, have been opened up to competition to some extent, largely as a result of EU legislation. This has resulted in changes in the regulatory environment and the...

We test for contagion between pairs of East Asian equity markets over the period 1990-2007.We develop an econometric methodology that allows us to test for both 'shift'and 'pure' contagion within a unified framework. Using both Hong Kong and Thailand as potential shock sources, we find strong...

This paper analyzes the sensitivity of market crashes to investors'psychology in a standard general equilibrium framwork. Contrary to the traditional view that market crashes are driven by large drops in aggregate endowments, we argue from a theoretical standpoint that individual anticipations...

There are a number of major anomalies that arise from forward foreign exchange rates. Though the level of the forward rate is an unbiased predictor of the future spot rate, the forward premium is poor predictor of future spot rate changes; speculative profits are so volatile that implausibly...

The idea that probability distribution functions could provide appropriate mathematical forms for utility functions representing risk aversion is of respectable antiquity. But the relatively few examples that have appeared in the economics literature have displayed quite restrictive risk...

This paper, presents a game theoretic approach to the choice of the debt maturity by firms. The maturity of the debt can be viewed as a signal about the firm's quality sent to the financial sector. Two situations are investigated when the firm declares bankruptcy: the firm's assets may have zero...