The geographical pattern of consumers’ expenditures, whether made on-site or online, has implications for the location of economic activity and regional economic development. Data limitations have however limited our knowledge of this aspect of consumer behaviour. This paper uses transaction...

Different causal mechanisms have been proposed to link commodity prices and exchange rates, with opposing implications. We examine these causal relationships empirically, using data on three commodities (crude oil, gold, copper) and four countries (Canada, Australia, Norway, Chile), over the...

Often an investigator is interested in a single parameter or low-dimensional parameter vector (e.g. a treatment effect) in a regression model, rather than in the full set of regression coefficients. There may also be a relatively high-dimensional set of potential explanatory variables other than...

This paper investigates inter-regional retail trade linkages, and changes in the gravity effects between cities and regions arising from online commerce, as opposed to traditional point-of-sale commerce. We build original inter-regional retail trade measures from nearly 20 billion domestic...

We assess the usefulness of a large set of electronic payments data comprising debit and credit card transactions, as well as cheques that clear through the banking system, as potential indicators of current GDP growth. These variables capture a broad range of spending activity and are available...