Government agencies produce indexes that purport to measure international competitiveness. The most common version is the real effective exchange rate, which is some form of weighted average of the real exchange rates of the country's trading partners. Such indexes convey a false sense of...

The present paper analyses citations in the work of a large number of PhD students. We show that the pattern of citations of journal articles, books and other reference material differs substantially across areas within economics. An investigation of reciprocal citations reveals a surprisingly...

Are food prices more or less equalised across countries? In view of obvious barriers to trade (both naturally occurring and of a man-made nature) and currency gyrations, the answer would seem to be an unambiguous “No”, but we show this question is worthy of further investigation. In order...