A revival of trade unions was widely expected when Blair’s New Labour government took over from the Conservatives in Britain in 1997. This did not occur. Collective bargaining continued to retreat. The paper discusses the implications of the changing economic context for the government’s...

Housing markets are subject to many interrelated sources of instability on both a microeconomic and macroeconomic scale. Housing decisions of different individuals will be interdependent, generating non-linearities, discontinuities and feedback effects. This paper focuses in on some behavioural...

Instrumental variable estimators can be severely biased in finite samples when the degree of overidentification is high or when the instruments are weakly correlated with the endogenous regressors. This paper proposes an estimator based on the use of the principal components of the instruments...

This paper considers the problem of aggregation in the case of large linear dynamic panels, where each micro unit is potentially related to all other micro units, and where micro innovations are allowed to be cross sectionally dependent. Following Pesaran (2003), an optimal aggregate function is...

This paper investigates the robustness of determinants of economic growth in the presence of model uncertainty, parameter heterogeneity and outliers. The robust model averaging approach introduced in the paper uses a flexible and parsimonious mixture modeling that allows for fat-tailed errors...

Interstate gas pipelines and their customers presently settle about 90% of the rate cases set for hearing before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). In recent years, the median time for negotiating settlements and having them approved is about 11 months, compared to several years to...

Electricity distribution networks are capital intensive systems and timely investments are crucial for long-term reliability of their service. In coming years, in the UK, and elsewhere in Europe, many networks are in need of extensive investments in their aging assets. Also, aspects of energy...

In this paper, we postulate that some of the best opportunities for reducing energy demand and carbon emissions are through stronger involvement and leadership from local government. We show that local government can and do have a significant impact on both energy production and energy...

We develop a stochastic two-stage optimisation model that captures the multistage nature of electricity transmission planning under uncertainty and apply it to a stylised representation of the Great Britain (GB) network. In our model, a proactive transmission planner makes investment decisions...

This paper studies the impact of the level and volatility of commodity terms of trade on economic growth, as well as on the three main growth channels: total factor productivity, physical capital accumulation, and human capital acquisition. We argue that volatility, rather than abundance per se,...