Since forecast failure is due to unanticipated large shifts in deterministic factors, sensible agents should adopt robust forecasting rules. Unless the model coincides with the generating mechanism, one cannot even prove that causal variables will dominate non-causal in forecasting. In such a...

As patent data become more available in machine-readable form, an increasing number of researchers have begun to use measures based on patents and their citations as indicators of technological output and information flow. This paper explores the economic meaning of these citation-based patent...

The relationships between inflation and macro-economic instability are discussed analytically, using a simple monetary model with rational expectations, with an application to the case of Madagascar. The recent macroeconomic history of this country suggests that high inflation is correlated with...

British regions display persistent differences in both earnings and unemployment rates. A number of studies have found that in general, regions that have high unemployment tend to have low wages. This runs contrary to a compensating differentials argument that high wages should compensate for...

Two essential intuitions about the concept of multidimensional inequality have been highlighted in the emerging body of literature on this subject: first, multidimensional inequality should be a function of the uniform inequality of a multivariate distribution of goods or attributes across...

This paper, forthcoming in Journal of Economic Surveys, provides an elementary, non-technical, survey of auction theory, by introducing and describing some of the critical papers in the subject. (The most important of these are reproduced in a companion book, The Economic Theory of Auctions,...

Recently, there has been a resurgence in the interest in the determinants of income inequality across countries. This paper adds to this literature by examining the role of one further explanatory variable: macroeconomic volatility. Using a cross-section of developed and developing countries, we...

After a dramatic slowdown of the 1970s, productivity growth in UK manufacturing in the 1980s returned to something like its pre-slowdown trend. This paper constructs a quarterly dynamic model of TFP growth in UK manufacturing using cointegration techniques, correcting for a variety of...

In this paper we extend Rydberg-Shephards acivity, direction and size decomposition of trade-by-trade price movements to the mulvariate case. We illustrate our ideas using a bivariate modelling problem - modelling the evolution of the prices of Ford and GM shares. Throughout we use the...