This paper analyses data from the Irish Household Budget Surveys of 1987, 1994 and 1999 to examine the evolution of inequality of income and expenditure over that period. The paper calculates Lorenz and Generalised Lorenz curves and also the Growth Incidence Curve of Ravallion and Chen to...

This paper shows that nonlinearity can provide an explanation for the forward exchange rate anomaly (Fama, 1984). Using sterling-Canadian dollar data, and modelling nonlinearity of unspecified form by means of a random field, we find strong evidence of time-wise nonlinearity and, significantly,...

Low rates of inflation have been recorded in the United States in recent years despite a decline in the unemployment rate. This phenomenon could be the result of a series of transitory shocks or of a permanent change in the structure of the economy leading to a lower NAIRU. The paper suggests...

We introduce the concept of cooperative substitutes and complements, and use it to throw light on the conditions for a research joint venture to choose equal levels of R&D by all member firms. We show that the second-order conditions for a symmetric optimum take a particularly simple form,...

Grouping models are widely used in economics but are subject to finite sample bias. I show that the standard errors-in-variables estimator (EVE) is exactly equivalent to the Jackknife Instrumental Variables Estimator (JIVE), and use this relationship to develop an estimator which, unlike EVE, is...

The standard public finance analysis of the welfare cost of labour income taxation is based on the estimation of labour supply functions that treat unemployed individuals as non-participants. This paper applies econometric models of multinomial discrete choice to the labour market, explicitly...

We calculate the NAIRU for the U.S. in a framework where inflation and the unemployment rate can respond to each other. The NAIRU is defined as the component of the actual unemployment rate that is uncorrelated with inflation in the long run. Using a structural VAR approach, the NAIRU and core...

This paper analysis the intertemporal public finance decision under political instability. The government’s choice between inflationary finance and foreign debt is constrained by an interest rate, which is affected both by market conditions and debt conditionality. The main result is that...