This paper considers forecast averaging when the same model is used but estimation is carried out over different estimation windows. It develops theoretical results for random walks when their drift and/or volatility are subject to one or more structural breaks. It is shown that compared to...

In this paper the comparability of two household budget surveys, the 1993 Hungarian Household Budget Survey and the 1993 UK Family Expenditure Survey. Using these data the authors derive measures of total household income and expenditure, and calculate poverty headcounts assuming seven different...

This paper introduces the concepts of time-specific weak and strong cross section dependence. A double-indexed process is said to be cross sectionally weakly dependent at a given point in time, t, if its weighted average along the cross section dimension (N) converges to its expectation in...

Incentive regulation for networks has been an important part of the reform agenda in a number of countries. As part of this regulatory process, incentives are put in place to improve the cost efficiency of network companies by rewarding good performance relative to a predefined benchmark. The...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the lessons from the recent history of telecoms deregulation for the electricity (and by implication heat) network regulation. We do this in the context of Ofgem’s RPIX@ 20 Review of energy regulation in the UK, which considers whether RPI-X based price...

We present a dynamic model of the indigenous natural gas industry in the UK. The model has been built using a system dynamics approach. Using the model several scenarios have been analysed. We found that management of the supply-side policy alone cannot substantially postpone the discovery,...

The South African government has set as a policy objective the halving of poverty by 2014, although the meaning of this goal has not yet been defined. This article frames government’s stated target of halving poverty by 2014 in terms of specific measures of the poverty gap and poverty...

This paper extends previous notions of causality to take into account the subspaces along which causality occurs as well as long run causality. The properties of these new notions of causality are extensively studied for a wide variety of time series processes. The paper then proves that the...

We give an overview of the economics of `public sector information' (PSI) focusing on the question of funding and regulatory structure. That is: who should pay to maintain public sector information and what regulatory structure should be put in place to support this.

The rapid growth of online search and its centrality to the ecology of the Internet raise many questions for economists to answer: Why is the search engine market so concentrated and will it evolve towards monopoly? What implications does this concentration have for consumers, search engines,...