Economy-wide losses occur due to sluggish factor adjustment: these notes focus on the role of training in economic restructuring, and provide a novel approach to assess the value of human resources management policies. As training raises mobility it speeds up reallocation, also with favourable...

The performance of bid-ask spread estimators is investigated using simulation experiments. All estimators are much more accurate if the data are sampled at high frequency. In high-frequency data, the Huang-Stoll estimator, which requires order flow information, generally outperforms Roll-type...

Several de facto exchange rate regime classifications have been widely used in empirical research, but they are known to disagree with one another to a disturbing extent. We dissect the algorithms employed and argue that they can be significantly improved. We implement the improvements, and show...

This paper assesses the role of sales as a feature of price dynamics using scanner data. The study analyses an extensive, high frequency panel of supermarket prices consisting of over 230,000 weekly price observations on around 500 products in 15 categories of food stocked by the UK’s seven...

Previous studies by Freund & Weinhold (2004) and others have highlighted the trade promoting effect of the Internet. However, recent developments in structural gravity modelling emphasise the importance of controlling for multilateral resistance. We employ a gravity framework to assess the role...

How much does the antiquity of states, and the sometimes arbitrary nature of colonial boundaries, explain why some states are more susceptible to civil conflict than others? Older states and those with greater historical legitimacy (more continuity between the pre-colonial and post-colonial...

Suppose that in aggregative games, in which a player's payoff depends only on this player's strategy and on an aggregate of all players' strategies, the players are endowed with constant conjectures about the reaction of the aggregate to marginal changes in the player's strategy. The players...

We provide a new perspective to the literature on innovation in a unionised labour market by considering price competition in the product market. In contrast to the conventional wisdom, suggesting the presence of labour union reduces the incentive for innovation, we show that this view may not...

In this paper we study the effects of reforms to corporate and personal income taxation on the rate of firm entry and exit using industry data for 19 OECD countries from 1998 to 2005. Using a difference-in-differences approach to correct for endogeneity bias we find that increases in corporate...

Firms that lay far behind the technological frontier have the most to gain from imitating the technology or management practices of others. That some firms converge relatively slowly to the productivity frontier suggests the existence of factors that cause them to under-invest in their...