The EU protects agriculture and manufacturing through its commercial policies, namely its tariffs, its non-tariff barriers and the Common Agricultural Policy. By leaving the EU the UK would be able to abandon the EU’s protectionist system in favour of free trade combined with transitional...

Recent work has exposed the extent of EU protectionism within the single market Customs Union. If the UK leaves the EU customs union for unilateral free trade, as a small country within the world market, it will therefore make gains according to the standard trade model. Should it do so, trade...

Some pro-Brexit MPs will not vote for the government's proposed Withdrawal Agreement because of its fine print: they think it will be written in indelible tablets of law that we can never change. But they forget that sovereign states will not indefinitely stay in treaties that do not suit them,...

The welfare effects of Brexit on the UK, the EU27 and the rest of the world are analysed in a model of international trade under oligopoly. A hard Brexit where the UK trades according to WTO rules is shown to decrease total UK welfare, to have an ambiguous effect on total EU27 welfare, and to...

The UK has been a net debtor over the past two decades and the sterling exchange rates are sensitive to any chaos that might occur in the Financial market. This paper examines the importance of the inter-national financial imperfections in the sterling exchange rate dynamics. We build a small...

This paper assesses UK innovation policy impact on a large, population weighted, sample of both service and manufacturing SMEs. By focussing on self-reported innovation the study achieves a wider coverage of the effects of SME innovation policy than possible with more traditional indicators....

Using an overlapping generations model in which the young save for old age using indexed and nominal government bonds, this paper investigates how optimal indexation is influenced by monetary policy. In order to do so, two monetary policies with markedly different long run implications are...

It has been widely argued that inflation persistence since WWII has been widespread and durable and that it can only be accounted for by models with a high degree of nominal rigidity. We examine UK post-war data where after confirming previous studies findings of varying persistence due to...