Beyond Regulation: An Analysis of Regulation and the Alternatives

The costs of business regulation in the UK are substantial. Compliance costs can be estimated at over 6% of GDP. Successive 'deregulation' initiatives have hardly reduced the burden. Alternative techniques should be explored.     

FINANCIAL INTERMEDIATION SERVICES INDIRECTLY MEASURED: ESTIMATES FOR FRANCE AND THE U.K. BASED ON THE APPROACH ADOPTED IN THE 1993 SNA

The 1993 SNA proposes a revised treatment of the output of financial intermediaries which treats intermediation services in part as a component of final demand, so that GDP is higher than the 1968 SNA suggests. In this paper we present the results of attempts to estimate FISIM (Financial Intermediation Services Indirectly Measured) for France and the U.K. The French study uses a reference rate calculated to ensure that no imputation is made with respect to own funds, while the U.K. study relies on a market interest rate. Both studies present an allocation of intermediation services by industry as well as by category of demand. The adjustments to GDP are of similar magnitudes in both countries.     

Fiscal Rules and the Scope for Risk Sharing

The trade-off between risk reduction and risk sharing has been at the heart of debates concerning EU economic governance over the last five years, but there are few signs as yet of a solution being reached.     

Demand Estimation in the Presence of Stochastic Trend and Seasonality: The Case of Meat Demand in the United Kingdom

If budget shares have stochastic trend or seasonality or both, then demand equations based on the assumption of deterministic trend and deterministic seasonality will be mis-specified. We test this proposition by estimating a Linearized Almost Ideal (LAI) demand system for meat demand in the United Kingdom using Harvey's structural time series methodology. We demonstrate that the model specification allowing for stochastic trend and deterministic seasonality performs best in terms of diagnostic tests and goodness of fit measures. It is also shown that the model with stochastic trend is better at out-of-sample forecasting.     

Means matter, but variance matter too: Decomposing response latency influences on variance heterogeneity in stated preference experiments

Response time latencies have been shown to influence consumer’s choice behaviour in choice-based-conjoint studies. The literature has shown that response time latencies affect the mean outputs of parameter estimates derived from models of discrete choice. In this paper, we add further insight into the influences response time latencies have on such models by modelling latent response information associated with the variance of random parameter distributions through parameterisation of variance heterogeneity (or heteroskedasticity). We demonstrate that response time latencies influence not only the means of random parameter distributions, but also the variances, and that failure to account for both may result in incorrect model inferences being drawn.