Business cycles in the U.S. and G-7 economies are asymmetric: recoveries and expansions tend to be long and gradual and busts tend to be short and sharp. Moreover, this type of asymmetry appears more pronounced in the last two cyclical episodes in the G-7. A large body of work views the last two...

This paper identifies total factor productivity (TFP) news shocks using standard VAR methodology and documents a new stylized fact: in response to news about future increases in TFP, inventories rise and comove positively with other major macroeconomic aggregates. The authors show that the...

We study the effects of news shocks on inventory accumulation in a structural VAR framework. We establish that inventories react strongly and positively to news about future increases in total factor productivity. Theory suggests that the transmission channel of news shocks to inventories works...

Jordan [2006] defined ‘pillage games’, a class of cooperative games whose dominance operator represents a ‘power function’ constrained by monotonicity axioms. In this environment, he proved that stable sets must be finite. We bound their cardinality above by a Ramsey number and show this...

We conduct the first high-frequency comparison of pricing behaviour in betting markets making use of a novel dataset of prices from the UK's two largest bookmakers and the world's largest betting exchange. We investigate price competitiveness, finding that the betting exchange structure offers...

This article uses automatic model selection procedures, based on the gernal-to-specific approach, to investigate inflation in China. A novelty of this article is the use of a technique called impulse indicator saturation which allows us to uncover instabilities and to specify a general model and...

The paper provides a theory of war and conflict issues, and applies the theory to the arms race and the possibility of war in the South Asian subcontinent. We try to give a new perspective on an old question: wars are not rational since they destroy the contestable resource over which disputes...

This paper examines the role played by community characteristics in influencing local environmental quality, focusing specifically on ethnic diversity. In contrast to the previous literature, this study argues that it is the fractionalization and/or polarization of ethnic groups that is the...

With the competitiveness of UK manufacturing declining steadily during the interwar period, and a significant rise in unemployment in the early 1930s, the UK government responded by introducing the General Tariff in February 1932 in an attempt to halt the increase in unemployment and the...