The evaluation of economic forecasts is a substantial and important aspect of economic research, and a considerable part of such evaluation is performed by comparing competing forecasts. This thesis focuses on the development of statistical procedures in order that reliable comparison of...

The present thesis is concerned with the relationship between price adjustments in response to changes in economic conditions and industrial market structure. Its point of departure consists of abandoning the time-honoured assumption that firms in industrial markets act as if they were price...

This thesis contains four papers in the area of Public Economics. Chapter 1 looks at producers' taxation in a model of vertically related oligopolies. Both ad valorem and specific taxes are considered and formulae expressing their effects on prices and profits are derived, showing how these...

We study the relationship between bargaining and competition with incomplete information. We consider a model with two uninformed and identical buyers and two sellers. One of the sellers has a privately-known reservation price, which can either be Low or High. The other seller?s reservation...

By distinguishing between producible and nonproducible public goods, we are able to propose a general equilibrium model with externalities that distinguishes between and encompasses both the Starrett [1972] and Boyd and Conley [1997] type external effects. We show that while nonconvexities...

Quantile forecasts are central to risk management decisions because of the widespread use of Value-at-Risk. A quantile forecast is the product of two factors: the model used to forecast volatility, and the method of computing quantiles from the volatility forecasts. In this paper we calculate...

The articles in this thesis reflect my work at the Centre for Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation in Warwick, centred around two EU-funded projects: one relating globalisation to social exclusion, and the second looking at the re-integration of the Central and Eastern European transition...