type="main" xml:id="obes12033-abs-0001" <title type="main">Abstract</title> <p>Humanitarian aid can be seen as a political investment motivated by altruism or by economic benefits for the donor. Uncertainty in the returns to this investment may generate hysteresis effects and inertia in aid allocations. I model the...</p>

A small macroeconomic model is used as the basis for estimating the determinants of investment in South Africa within a simultaneous equations framework. Investment is highly sensitive to interest rates, relative prices, and political instability. The policy implications of such sensitivity are...

Published comparisons of real exchange rate volatility have concentrated on the dispersion of monthly or quarterly movements. If volatility is to be a measure of the potential for misalignment, account must also be taken of the persistence of such movements. A simple measure of long-run...

Previous research (on countries other than the UK) finds better-performing firms to be more likely to export. We test this hypothesis for UK firms. The relationship between exporting and firm variables is significantly different for firms that have experienced a major innovation ("innovating...