This paper provides new estimates of the return on capital employed (ROCE) for major British railway companies. It shows that ROCE was generally below the cost of capital after the mid-1870s and fell till the turn of the century. Addressing issues of cost inefficiency could have restored ROCE to...

When Economic Development was published in 1958, Ireland was a growth failure but thirty years later it became the Celtic Tiger. This paper places this remarkable development in the context of long-run economic growth in Western Europe and establishes the distinctive features of Irish experience...

We report estimates of the fiscal multiplier for interwar Britain based on quarterly data, time-series econometrics, and ‘defense news’. We find that the government expenditure multiplier was in the range 0.3 to 0.8, much lower than previous estimates. The scope for a Keynesian solution to...

Much current research in functional MRI employs multivariate machine learning approaches (e.g., support vector machines) to detect fine-scale spatial patterns from the temporal fluctuations of the neural signal. The aim of many studies is not classification, however, but investigation of...

This paper studies consumer search and pricing behaviour in the British domestic electricity market following its opening to competition in 1999. We develop a sequential search model in which an incumbent and an entrant group compete for consumers who nd it costly to obtain information on prices...

This paper studies the impact of competition on the degree of inefficiency in lemons markets. More precisely, we characterize the second-best mechanism (i.e., the optimal mechanism with private information) in a stylized lemons market with finite numbers of buyers and sellers. We then study the...

Social networks representing the pattern of social interactions - who talks to or who observes whom- play a crucial role as a medium for the spread of information, ideas, diseases, products. Someone in the population may struck with an infection or may adopt a new technology, and it can then...

We introduce a methodology for analysing infinite horizon economies with two agents, one good, and incomplete markets. We provide an example in which an agent’s equilibrium consumption is zero eventually with probability one even if she has correct beliefs and is marginally more patient. We...

Cognitive biases have been a recognised feature of research into human behaviour...

This paper derives a micro-founded gravity equation in general equilibrium based on a translog demand system that allows for endogenous markups and rich substitution patterns across goods. In contrast to standard CES-based gravity equations, trade is more sensitive to trade costs if the...