This paper attempts to establish the trend of market development in Europe in thecenturies before the industrial revolution, by applying three different measures ofmarket integration to a compilation of monthly and annual price data. In contrast tomuch of the existing work, which suggests that...

The existence of a self-regulating arbitrage mechanism under the gold standard has been tradi-tionally considered as one of its main advantages, and attracted a corresponding research interest.This research is arguably relevant not only to test for the effciency of the gold points, but also...

Characteristics models have been found to be useful in many areas of economics. However,their empirical implementation tends to rely heavily on functional form assumptions. Inthis paper we develop a revealed preference approach to characteristics models. We derivethe necessary and sufficient...

Time consistency problems can arise when environmental taxes are employedto encourage firms to take irreversible abatement decisions. Setting a high carbontax, for instance, would induce firms to invest in low-carbon technology,yet once investment has occurred the government can then reduce the...

Proposals are often made to tax goods which are environmentally damaging. Manysuch goods are consumed both directly by households and industry at large: for example,carbon-intensive fuel, waste water or congested road space. This paper adopts a tax-reformsetting to evaluate such a policy. The...

This paper examines the impact of a major change in dividend taxation introduced in the UK in July1997. The reform was structured in such a way that the immediate impact fell almost entirely on thelargest investor class in the UK, namely pension funds. We analyse the behaviour of share...

Trade unions have been successful in compressing the wage distributionbut not in influencing the share of national income going to labour. This paperclaims that a compressed wage distribution provides insurance in the same way thatthe tax and benefit system does and thus may be...