Many previous studies of the role of trade during the British Industrial Revolution have found little or no role for trade in explaining British living standards or growth rates. We construct a three-region model of the world in which Britain trades with North America and the rest of the world,...

The frequency and severity of medical liability litigation in the United Kingdom have increased since the middle of the twentieth century. Recent estimates of settling out-standing negligence claims hover around at least 10 percent of the National Health Service’s total annual budget. This...

There is an implicit consensus that 1930s exchange-rate regimes can be characterised as some variant of ‘floating’. This paper applies an adaptation of modern methodologies of exchange-rate regime classification to a panel of 47 countries in weekly observations between January 1919 and...

The class of Functional Signal plus Noise (FSN) models is introduced that provides a new, general method for modelling and forecasting time series of economic functions. The underlying, continuous economic function (or `signal') is a natural cubic spline whose dynamic evolution is driven by a...

This paper analyses the effect of limits on fiscal deficits when fiscal policy outcomes depend on automatic stabilizers and when fiscal rules lack perfect credibility. The model developed, which includes interactions between monetary and fiscal policy, provides theoretical support for existing...

A vector autoregression with deterministic terms with no restrictions to its characteristic roots is considered. Strong consistency results and also some weak convergence results are given for a number of least squares statistics. These statistics are related to the denominator matrix of the...

In a recent paper we have introduced the class of realised kernel estimators of the increments of quadratic variation in the presence of noise. We showed that this estimator is consistent and derived its limit distribution under various assumptions on the kernel weights. In this paper we extend...

In a wide variety of international macro models monetary policy cooperation is optimal, non-cooperative policies are inefficient, but optimal policies can be attained noncooperatively by optimal design of domestic institutions. We show that given endogenous instititional design, inefficiencies...