Following the government’s decision to place Railtrack into administration (October 2001), attention has focused on what went wrong with privatisation, and how crucial network investment will be financed in future. This paper uses a social cost-benefit analysis framework to assess whether the...

Following Hall (1997) it is increasingly common to incorporate preference, as well as productivity, perturbations in calibrated general equilibrium models. We assess the performance of a small open economy stochastic growth model (based on the Blanchard-Yaari framework) under alternate driving...

This paper investigates the statistical properties of the Black-Scholes option price under a Bayesian approach. We incorporate randomness, both in the price process and in volatility, to derive the prior and posterior densities of a European call option. Expressions for the density of the option...

The co-existence of franchised and company-owned stores influences the dynamic of innovation in franchise systems as well as the balance of power between franchisees and their chain. We report on case studies of five franchise system. We focus on how innovation and authority are interrelated in...

In the Internet information packets are routed through many vertically related hops. However these network hierarchies are not fixed. Two providers can be simultaneously vertically related in a routing process as supplier and retailer, while horizontally competing in another. We study pricing...

We consider different patterns of infinite technological adoption choices by firms in a Bertran duopoly. Every period, technological progress provides a sequence of cost reducing innovations. The equilibrium concept is Markov Perfect Equilibrium. We analyse conditions for which equilibrium...

Optimal nominal interest rates rule are usually set assuming that the underlying world is linear. Our work relaxes this assumption and examines the performance of optimal rules when non-linearities are present. In particular if the inflation-output trade off exhibits non linearities...

This paper explores the increasing private involvement in social infrastructure projects in the UK since 1979. It begins by reviewing the effect of privatisation on the quantity of investment undertaken by the utility sector. The evidence is consistent with the view that the private sector is...

Many industrialised countries have experienced an increase in environmental awareness and support to green lobby groups in past decades. This paper develops a political-economy model to investigate to what extent a rise of environmentalism, via the induced change in political power structures,...

Franchises are peculiar in two ways: first, the authority of franchisees is largely informal rather than formal. The efficiency of franchises is often attributed to their initiative and autonomy. Yet, in franchise contracts, franchisees agree to submit to the sometimes arbitrary will of the...