In an attempt to reduce high electricity prices in England and Wales the government has reduced concentration among generators and introduced New Electricity Trading Arrangements (NETA). Econometric analysis on monthly data from April 1996 to September 2002 implies support for two conflicting...

This paper attempts to verify whether we are moving towards a new paradigm of the network energy industry (electricity and natural gas), based on a wide decentralisation of the energy supply. We do this by comparing the social benefits of decentralised and centralised models, simulating...

This paper considers the use of neural networks to model bounded rational behaviour. The underlying theory and use of neural networks is now a component of various forms of scientific enquiry, be it modelling artificial intelligence, developing better pattern recognition or solving complex...

The purpose of this paper is to propose an innovative method of evaluating the performance of active fund managers, by introducing to the field of performance measurement the more appealing loss aversion utility theory. We combine the latter to an already established performance measure...

Empirical evidence suggests that many macroeconomic and financial time-series are subject to occasional structural breaks. In this paper we present analytical results quantifying the effects of such breaks on the correlation between the forecast and the realisation, and on the ability to...

This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of online price dispersion in Europe, across a broad range of product categories and countries. Using the dominant European price comparison site we collected firm specific prices, weekly, from sevcn European countries (Denmark, France, Italy,...

In this paper we review some fundamental issues that have been identified by macroeconomists in discussing the co-ordination of monetary and fiscal policy. As Sargent and Wallace (1981) graphically illustrated, the consolidated public sector present-value budget constraint means that monetary...

We consider an alternative use of simulation in the context of using the Likelihood-Ratio statistic to test non-nested models. To date simulation has been used to estimate the Kullback-Leibler measure of closeness between two densities, which in turn ‘mean adjusts’ the Likelihood-Ratio...

The standard simple sequential herding model is altered to allow a firm with a new product to have it reviewed publicly before launch. Reviewers are either inherently pessimistic, optimistic or unbiased. We find the counter-intuitive result that a firm with a good product will prefer a...

Autoregressive models are used routinely in forecasting and often lead to better performance than more complicated models. However, empirical evidence is also suggesting that the autoregressive representations of many macroeconomic and financial time series are likely to be subject to structural...