This paper provides a historical look at how the multilateral trading system has coped with the challenge of shocks and shifts. By shocks we mean sudden jolts to the world economy in the form of financial crises and deep recessions, or wars and political conflicts. By shifts we mean slow-moving,...

The frequency and severity of medical liability litigation in the United Kingdom have increased since the middle of the twentieth century. Recent estimates of settling out-standing negligence claims hover around at least 10 percent of the National Health Service’s total annual budget. This...

There is an implicit consensus that 1930s exchange-rate regimes can be characterised as some variant of ‘floating’. This paper applies an adaptation of modern methodologies of exchange-rate regime classification to a panel of 47 countries in weekly observations between January 1919 and...

The class of Functional Signal plus Noise (FSN) models is introduced that provides a new, general method for modelling and forecasting time series of economic functions. The underlying, continuous economic function (or `signal') is a natural cubic spline whose dynamic evolution is driven by a...

This paper analyses the effect of limits on fiscal deficits when fiscal policy outcomes depend on automatic stabilizers and when fiscal rules lack perfect credibility. The model developed, which includes interactions between monetary and fiscal policy, provides theoretical support for existing...

A vector autoregression with deterministic terms with no restrictions to its characteristic roots is considered. Strong consistency results and also some weak convergence results are given for a number of least squares statistics. These statistics are related to the denominator matrix of the...

In a recent paper we have introduced the class of realised kernel estimators of the increments of quadratic variation in the presence of noise. We showed that this estimator is consistent and derived its limit distribution under various assumptions on the kernel weights. In this paper we extend...

For over a quarter of a century, the use of utility information based upon interpersonal comparisons has been seen as an escape route from the Arrow Impossibility Theorem. This paper critically examines this informational basis approach to social choice. Even with comparability of differences...

This paper studies the ethical underpinnings of two social criteria which are prominent in the literature dealing with the problem of evaluating allocations of several consumption goods in a population with heteregenous preferences. The Pazner-Schmeidler criterion (Pazner-Schmeidler 1978) and...