This paper examines labours organisation and labours reward in Catalonia before the first Industrial Revolution. Using new quantitative evidence on urban wages, it first shows that agricultural and urban real wages did not decrease during the last five decades of the pre-industrial period,...

A marked acceleration of total factor productivity (TFP) growth in U.S. manufacturing followed World War I. This development contributed substantially to the absolute and relative rise of the domestic economys aggregate TFP residual, which is observed when the growth accounts for the first...

Trygve Haavelmo's Probability Approach aimed to implement economic theories, but he later recognized their incompleteness. Although he did not explicitly consider model selection, we apply it when theory-relevant variables, {xt}, are retained without selection while selecting other candidate...

I show that the fiscal position of the UK means it will be very hard for the next government to allow the undergraduate fee cap to increase beyond the rate of inflation.  The funding postion of the higher education sector can be improved by the government removing the interest rate subsidy it...

Contemporaries and historians have highlighted London's position as the world's leading financial centre, and its dominance of both trade financing and international capital investment at this time.  The current historical literature focuses on the presence of the London Stock Exchange and...

Risk-neutral individuals take more risky decisions when they have limited liability.  Risk-neutral managers may not when acting as agents under contract and taking costly actions to acquire informatin before taking decisions.  Limited liability makes it optimal to increase the reward for...

The interwar years saw the rise of New York to challenge London as the world's leading provider of financial services.  This paper will show that the current explanations fail to identify a key factor in New York's rise.  The City was prevented from operating a full capacity by a capital...

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...

In this paper we use a dynamic structural life-cycle model to analyze the employment, fiscal and welfare effects induced by unemployment insurance.  The model features a detailed specification of the tax and transfer system, including unemployment insurance benefits which depend on an...

The consumption behaviour of UK, US and Japanese households is examined and compared using a modern Ando-Modigliani style consumption function.  The models incorporate income growth expectations, income uncertainty, housing collateral and other credit effects.  These models therefore capture...