Consider a two period financial economy with incomplete markets and with agents having von Neumann-Morgenstern utility functions. It is well known that when the economy’s endowments are collinear, its excess demand function will obey the weak axiom when certain mild restrictions are...

Internet commerce has made it easier to compare prices and shop online.  However, it has also exposed consumers to a new kind of crime in the form of the electronic theft of payment details.  However the skills required to successfully intercept payment data differ from the skills required to...

The recent controversy over model selection in the context of `growth regressions` has led to some remarkably numerous `estimation` strategies, including 4 million regressions by Sala-i-Martin (1997b). Only one regression is really needed, namely the general unrestricted model, appropriately...

This book is a non-technical introduction to auction theory; its practical application in auction design (including many examples); and its uses in other parts of economics. It can be used for a graduate course on auction theory, or – by picking selectively – an advanced...

Existing theories of pre-emptive war typically predict that the leading country may choose to launch a war on a follower who is catching up, since the follower cannot credibly commit to not use their increased power in the future.  But it was Japan who launched a war against the West in 1941,...

How far were monetary targets imposed on the post-1974 Labour Government by international and domestic financial markets enthused with the doctrines of ‘monetarism’? The following paper attempts to answer this question by demonstrating the complex and contingent nature of the ascent...

We examine the impact of the Great Depression on the share of votes for right-wing anti-system parties in elections in the 1920s and 1930s.  We confirm the existence of a link between political extremism and economic hard times as captured by growth or contraction of the economy.  What...

UK inflation varied greatly over 1865-1990, in response to many policy and exchange-rate regimes, two world wars and oil crises, and major legislative, and technological changes. It is modelled as responding to excess demands from all sectors of the economy: goods and services, factors of...

We revisit the concept of unpredictability to explore its implications for forecasting strategies in a non-stationary world subject to structural breaks, where model and mechanism differ. Six aspects of the role of unpredictability are distinguished, compounding the four additional mistakes most...

The Soviet Union was able to develop a large military-industrial complex and become the world’s second superpower despite the small size of its malfunctioning planned economy because defence was given high priority status and special planning, rationing and administrative mechanism were...