The success of IMF supported programmes has conventionally been assessed by examining their effects on intermediate variables such as fiscal deficits, monetary growth and exchange rates, and final outcomes, such as the balance of payments, inflation and economic growth. However, little or no...

We examine the properties of several residual-based cointegration tests when long run parameters are subject to multiple shifts driven by an unobservable Markov process. Unlike earlier work, which considered one-off deterministic breaks, our approach has the advantage of allowing for an...

Many studies have shown that technical change has led to job polarisation. A relatively unexplored aspect of this is whether there has been a gender bias. This paper is the first to show gender bias in technology driven skill polarisation. Between 1997 and 2006 the demand for women shows...

The paper develops a banking framework where a welfare comparison is made between non-tradable demand deposit and equity contracts. Contrary to the existing literature that relies heavily on smooth preferences assumption to justify the liquidity insurance superiority of the ‘run-prone’ debt...

We examine fiscal policy coordination in a two-country world with two types of asymmetries. The first type of asymmetry is a difference in the efficiency of taxation systems, the second is a varying degree of myopia as represented by discount rates. We examine the conditions under which...

Much has been written about the impact of over-education on wages using cross-sectional data, although there have been few studies that analyse the returns to over-education in a dynamic setting. This paper adds to the existing literature by using panel data to investigate the impact and...

Traditional models have encountered problems in explaining the ac- cumulation of international reserves, particularly in Asia, in the period since the late 1990s. One suggestion has been that countries have sought to self insure against future crises, either because of a perceived increase in...

We solve a model of time to build, in closed form, for the special case where the only option is commencing investment. The ratio of the optimal to the NPV investment threshold is as in the standard analysis of irreversible investment. We then report numerical solutions for the general case...

In this paper we study the causal impact of police on crime by looking at what happened to crime before and after the terror attacks that hit central London in July 2005. The attacks resulted in a large redeployment of police officers to central London boroughs as compared to outer London – in...

We test for the presence of externalities in UK manufacturing industry, seeking to identify the channels through which they operate. Using survey data on average variable cost available by industry, we estimate a translog cost function, storing the coefficients on time dummies for a second stage...