This paper examines under what conditions fiscal policy in the form of government spending should contribute to macroeconomic stabilisation. To this end optimal fiscal targeting rules minimising the microfounded social loss are examined in the following settings. Firstly, for the benchmark New...

We compare the most common methods for selling a company or other asset when participation is costly: a simple simultaneous auction, and a sequential process in which potential buyers decide in turn whether or not to enter the bidding. The sequential process is always more efficient. But...

It has long been known that maximum likelihood estimation in a Poisson model reproduces the chain-ladder technique. We revisit this model. A new canonical parametrisation is proposed to circumvent the inherent identification problem in the parametrisation. The maximum likelihood estimators for...

We undertake a generalization of the cumulative sum of squares (CUSQ) test to the case of non-stationary autoregressive distributed lag models with quite general deterministic time trends. The test may be validly implemented with either ordinary least squares residuals or standardized forecast...

In this paper we analyse market co-movements during the global financial crisis. Using high frequency data and accounting for market microstructure noise and non-synchronous trading, interdependencies between differing as-set classes such as equity, FX, fixed income, commodity and energy...

The condition for when a price control increases consumer welfare in perfect competition is tighter than often realised. When demand is linear, a small restriction on price only increases consumer surplus if the elasticity of demand exceeds the elasticity of supply; with log-linear or...

An observer makes a number of observations of an industry producing a homoge- neous good. Each observation consists of the market price, the output of individual firms and perhaps information on each firm's production cost. We provide vari- ous tests (typically, linear programs) with which the...

Johansen derived the asymptotic theory for his cointegration rank test statisic for a vector autoregression where the parameters are restricted so the process is integrated of order one. It is investigated to what extent these parameter restrictions are binding. The eigenvalues of Johansen’s...

During extreme hyper-inflations productivity tends to fall dramatically. Yet, in models of money demand in hyper-inflation variables such as real income has been given a somewhat passive role, either assuming it exogenous or to have a negligible role. In this paper we use an empirical...

In pre-industrial economies labour supply curves often bend backwards at very low levels of income. This changed prior to the industrial revolution: total working hours increased (De Vries (1993, Voth (1998,2000). This paper examines this industrious revolution using a model of labour supply...