The Euthanasia of the Renter

Since housing, distorted by council provision and rent regulation, is very difficult to find, unemployed workers stay at home rather than move to areas where they might find jobs. Rent restriction thus increases unemployment as well as homelessness, but there was little in the Conservative manifesto to show that the new Thatcher administration will do anything more than acknowledge the problem.     

The Impact of Volatility on Firms Holding Growth Options

“Abuses of real option valuation were partly behind the ramping and subsequent deramping of the 2000 internet techno bubble. No one ever got to eat the free lunch these real option 'theorists' promised. No one ever will; no one ever could.” (Mayor 2001, 53) Growth options contribute to over 95% of the market value of Internet stocks such as Amazon.com, America Online, and eBay. Finance theory often promotes market volatility as being desirable for investors holding financial options. Is volatility also desirable for firms holding growth options? While many argue that it is, this paper presents a simple example illustrating that increasing volatility can destroy growth option value, especially for firms holding “quality” growth options.     

Where there’s muck,there’s brass:1 the market for manure in the industrial revolution2

This article presents the first systematic analysis of off‐farm sources of nitrogen, such as urban and industrial waste, used in English agriculture during the industrial revolution, arguing that their use was widespread and intensive by 1700 and that there was only modest growth in their use up to 1840. It explains the pattern of use by supply and demand factors, and develops a new method to estimate the overall impact on wheat yields. It estimates that throughout the period 1700–1840 yields were 20 per cent higher than they would have been if no off‐farm manures had been used.     

Modelling the trend and seasonality in the consumption of alcoholic beverages in the United Kingdom

A univariate time series analysis of the consumption of beer, wine and spirits in the UK over the period 1964–1995 is presented. The analysis shows that the consumption of beer and wine exhibits stochastic seasonality while the consumption of spirits exhibits deterministic seasonality. Moreover, the three series are found to have stochastic trends. Analysis of the out-of-sample forecasting power of the various models reveals that the model with stochastic trend and seasonality is superior to other models. The results cast doubt on the validity and soundness of the practice of modelling the consumption of alcoholic beverages by assuming deterministic trend and seasonality.