This thesis uses general-equilibrium numerical-simulation techniques to analyse trade and environmental issues. It tries to take applied general equilibrium modelling in these areas beyond their traditional confines in a number of ways. These include endogenous incorporation of international...

In this PhD we analyse some topics about food-retail pricing behaviour from the point of view of the empirical industrial organisation. Large UK supermarkets chains are actively involved in quality discrimination; they offer three quality variants for most of the products they sell. These...

This thesis develops three new classes of Bayesian graphical models to forecast multivariate time series. Although these models were originally motivated by the need for flexible and tractable forecasting models appropriate for modelling competitive business markets, they are of theoretical...

This thesis builds on the research tradition of Cultural Economics, particularly of its empirical strand. The thesis includes four articles that each analyse empirically a different facet of production of cultural services. Together they contribute to the two main themes of the thesis: features...

The concept of a "production function" as means to measuring efficiency began in 1928 with the seminal paper by Cobb and Douglas (1928). However, until the 1950s, production functions were largely used as a tool for studying the functional distribution of income between capital and labour....

In the first chapter we investigate the strategy of exchange rate pegging as a solution to the lack of credibility of domestic monetary policy in the context of the European Monetary System (EMS). Existing theoretical models cannot explain the following features of the EMS and its crisis in...

The aim of this thesis is the development of a political economy of large accounting and auditing firms. The importance of this lies in the rapid growth of these firms and the lack of appropriate theories. Economists have applied the theory of the firm to accounting and have approached auditing...

This thesis examines certain key problems that the existence of forward rational expectations poses for policy analysis. The separate stages of estimating, testing and solving an econometric model are dealt with in turn. The main body of original work is in chapters four and six. In chapter four...

Chapter 2, titled "Hotelling Tax Competition" shows how competition among governments for mobile firms can bring about excessive differentiation in levels of taxation and public good provision. Hotelling's Principle of Minimum Differentiation is applied in the context of tax competition and...

In this Thesis we study some aspects related to the determinants and the consequences of acquiring education in the UK. Chapter one outlines the structure of the Thesis. In chapter two we analyse the probability of staying-on at school at age 16 in England and Wales using data from the 1970...