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This study aims to examine how the climate affects the behaviour of the stock market. To achieve this, we have drawn on daily data from Jan 2005 to Jan 31, 2023 and several environmental factors (e.g., temperature, humidity, cloud cover and visibility) to account for extreme weather conditions using the 21-day moving average and its standard deviation. The empirical analysis has revealed three key findings regarding the impact of weather on the stock market's behaviour. First, various forms of extreme weather conditions consistently lead to influence stock behaviour. Second, results provide valuable insights into market behaviour and help investors to make more informed investment decisions. Third, the weather conditions have new information about the climate risk and investors should react to it swiftly in light of our findings. The saliency theory can help reconcile the theoretical conflicts between the real options and risk-shifting theories when it comes to investing in uncertain and extreme climate conditions., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.)

The article discusses a review on the evaluations of ten initiatives specifically promoted in the National Health Service (NHS) white paper "Our Health, Our Care, Our Say," published in January 2006. An extensive mapping exercise was made to identify evaluations of the specified initiatives being conducted in England. It indicates that the rhetorical commitment to evaluation was compromised and the investment in evaluation at national and local levels was not as productive.

What caused the recovery from the British Great Depression? A leading explanation – the 'expectations channel' – suggests that a shift in expected inflation lowered real interest rates and stimulated consumption and investment. However, few studies have measured, or tested the economic consequences of, inflation expectations. In this paper, we collect high‐frequency information from primary and secondary sources to measure expected inflation in the United Kingdom between the wars. A high‐frequency vector autoregression suggests that inflation expectations were an important source of the early stages of economic recovery in interwar Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Only half of investment by firms is in physical capital, such as buildings and machinery. The other half is in intangible assets, such as branding, software and training. This has been true for the past two decades or more in the UK, but only if you step beyond the measures in the National Accounts, which include only some of the recognised intangible assets. This paper surveys ongoing work at the Office for National Statistics to develop measures of investment in intangible assets, using new insights and innovative approaches. In particular, this paper reviews developments in three areas: in-house branding investments, employer-funded training investments, and in-house investments in organisational capital. We reconsider some of the key assumptions made in the literature and propose alternative approaches to measurement. The paper concludes by considering implications of this work, and identifies some of the remaining gaps in the evidence base for measuring intangible assets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Business investment is one of the most volatile components of demand. Whether or not tax policy can be used to boost investment is an age-old policy question. After documenting both how tax policy has changed since 1980 and the impact of these changes on the cost of capital, this paper investigates that question using a UK dataset. The paper shows that tax changes have had large impacts on the user cost of capital, but that estimates of the user cost elasticity imply quite small impacts on the long-run capital stock. Adopting an alternative experimental approach for the first time using UK data shows large impacts of taxation on investment in periods following the announcement of major reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior studies provide evidence that both corporate governance and corporate investment efficiency affect corporate disclosure practice. In this paper, we examine their joint effect on disclosure. In particular, we examine whether corporate governance quality and corporate investment efficiency act as substitutes or complements in their impact on narrative disclosure. We collect disclosure scores from Lancaster University's Corporate Financial Information Environment (CFIE) website for a sample of non-financial UK companies for the period 2007--2014. We regress measures of corporate governance and corporate investment efficiency on two different proxies of disclosure practice (performance commentaries disclosure and the tone of narrative disclosure). Consistent with prior studies, we find that both governance and investment efficiency affect disclosure. We contribute to narrative disclosure studies in two crucial respects. First, we provide empirical evidence that governance and investment efficiency has a complementary effect on performance commentaries disclosure. Second, we contribute to the disclosure tone literature by providing empirical evidence that both governance and investment efficiency have a substitution effect on the tone of narrative disclosure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The level of UK corporate debt directly affects financial stability in the United Kingdom because a significant amount of the exposure of the UK financial system is to UK corporates. Our paper provides a comparison of the determinants of corporate debt in the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Germany. The comparison serves to benchmark our findings about the determinants of UK corporate debt. In addition, the UK financial sector is significantly exposed to the corporate sectors in the United States, Germany and France. The model assesses the contribution of investment, acquisitions, cash flows and market-to-book values to the determination of debt, and also the tendency of debt to revert to its optimum level. Debt was found to be positively related to the financing needs of the firm, and the optimum level of debt to be negatively related to the market-to-book ratio. This casts some light on the procyclicality of debt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with public perceptions and attitudes to heritage townscapes, and how these might be influenced by investment in such places, focused on their public realm, and building restoration and improvement as a catalyst for urban regeneration. It draws on a ten-year study of the impact of the Townscape Heritage Initiative, funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, on a sample of 16 cases across the UK. By comparing an analysis of changes in townscape quality over this period, with changes in public perceptions (captured through the use of a household survey in all 16 cases at three points in the ten-year period), it draws empirically grounded conclusions about the influence of heritage investment on attitudes and perceptions to the quality of the local environment. The findings from the research suggests that public attitudes are positively influenced by programmes of investment in the built heritage, but that this influence is complex and is not as robust as the physical regeneration itself. The paper also reflects on the relative influence of the post-2008 economic recession on public attitudes to place compared with the influence of heritage investment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper estimates UK capital adjustment costs, using manufacturing and service industry data for 1970–2000. There is evidence of significant adjustment costs, with a 1% increase in investment reducing value added by 0.05%. This implies an elasticity of investment with respect to Tobin's q of 2.5, and a convergence time for capital of 12 years. The results suggest that adjustment costs may have caused half of the slowdown in UK total factor productivity (TFP) growth during the second half of the 1990s. The impact is larger than that reported for the United States, reflecting larger adjustment costs and higher investment growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With increasing global competition for manufacturers, interest has grown among researchers and practitioners in the role of advanced manufacturing technologies (AMT) in assisting firms to maintain their competitive edge. To contribute to the debate, this paper presents three case studies, one each from Australia, Britain and Canada, of companies investing in one type of AMT, computer numerical controlled (CNC) machines. The findings reported in this paper draw on the experiences of companies in developed economies but which are geographically dispersed and have different histories of industrialisation. Nevertheless when it comes to implementing AMT, there are far more similarities than differences in their experiences. The message is that for successful implementation of AMT, companies need to ensure that a broad, market driven perspective is taken to these investments, that attention is given to integration across systems and that people issues require as much attention as those directly relating to the actual technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Industrial organization theory has identified strategic investment in capacity as an important element in competition in oligopolistic markets. In the paper we specify a model of oligopolistic investment behaviour, and test it with panel data for 114 firms in 15 narrowly defined UK manufacturing industries in the 1970s and 1980s. The industries are distinguished according to their market characteristics as fragmented, dominant firm and dominant group sectors. The results indicate behaviour which is noncooperative in fragmented sectors, cooperative in dominant group sectors and competitive in dominant firm sectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines if investors exhibited evidence of the availability heuristic in their investment decisions when significant price changes occurred in the British stock market during the 2010–2018 period. We raise the hypothesis that if a significant stock price move takes place on a day when the stock market index also undergoes a significant change (either positive or negative), then the magnitude of that shock may be increased by the availability of positive investment or negative outcomes. We applied three different proxies for large stock price changes which yielded a robust sample of events for this study. We found no significant evidence of the availability heuristic. In addition, we also found no significant evidence of price overreaction for both price decreases and increases. Inversely, we found robust results that suggest randomness in the behavior of stock prices in this period, thus supporting the efficiency of financial markets and opposing the results from similar studies carried out in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to investigate the contagion across real estate markets of four countries: Hong Kong, China, U.S. and U.K., during the financial tsunami in 2008. We use the Forbes-Rigobon test, the coskewness test and the cokurtosis test. We propose a new cokurtosis test constructed by extending the method of constructing the coskewness test to further higher order moments. It can show additional channels of contagion that other tests fail to show, and hence can provide more information on the direction of contagion, and reflect a more complete picture of the contagion pattern. The coskewness and cokurtosis tests show that contagion exists between the four countries, and the contagion effect is stronger between Hong Kong and China, and between U.S. and U.K. This provides clues for investors on how to diversify their investment to reduce their risk. This paper bridges the gap that previous works on contagion across real estate markets give mixed results, and gives a first insight into the contagion pattern of global real estate markets during the financial tsunami. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the history of the new issue prospectus on the London Stock Exchange from the advent of limited liability to World War II. The varying types of securities being offered to an increasingly large public influenced the nature of the information provided, and the increasing maturity of the new issue market allowed comparisons to be made with other companies and valuation ‘norms’ to be established. The paper concludes that the signalling role of the new issue prospectus was key in the lightly regulated markets of the time and that information disclosure improved well in advance of regulatory requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article provides a case study of four late nineteenth-century share flotations of Indian railway companies. It highlights an important gap in the historiography of Indian railway finance, which has focused on the period up to 1875. The role of N. M. Rothschild as lead underwriter and its relationship with the India Office, managing agents, and investors is analysed. This gives an evolving picture of mutual dependence between the City and Whitehall in the financing of the British Empire's largest investment programme. Gentlemanly capitalists are shown to combine the self-reinforcing roles of arranger, investor, and informal government advisor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Standard models fail to explain variation in UK capital investment. This paper develops and tests a new theory based on the insights of Edmond Malinvaud, in which investment under uncertainty is adjusted to balance the cost of excess and deficient capacity. Using quarterly UK manufacturing data on two capital assets (machinery and building) over a 30-year period, we obtain unique Co integrating relationships for the model, linking investment, profitability and capacity utilization. Non-nested testing shows that the estimated model performs similarly to a frequently used survey of investment intentions. Our model also addresses differences in the behaviour of the two asset classes; we show that building investment fell relative to machinery investment over the period, reflecting not only relative prices and profitability, but also long term influences such as technology or governance. At the macro level we find little role for any effects from taxation or financial constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationship between foreign ownership and productivity, paying particular attention to two issues neglected in the existing literature—the role of multinationals in service sectors and the importance of R&D activity conducted by foreign multinationals. We review existing theoretical and empirical work, which largely focuses on manufacturing, before presenting new evidence using establishment-level data on production, service, and R&D activity for Great Britain. We find that multinationals play an important role in service sectors and that entry of foreign multinationals by takeover is more prevalent than greenfield investment. We find that British multinationals have lower levels of labour productivity than foreign multinationals, but the difference is less stark in the service sector than in the production sector, and that British multinationals have lower levels of investment and intermediate use per employee. We also find that foreign-owned multinationals conduct a substantial amount of British R&D. We discuss the implications of these and other findings for the policy debate on incentives to influence multinational firms' location choices. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper I attempt to redress the lack of comparative cultural policy research between the United States and the United Kingdom. Specifically, I seek to develop and test a methodology of direct government investment in cultural capital. The new methodology will be presented in three parts. In the first part, the relevant literature in comparative cultural policy research is comprehensively reviewed for the strengths and weaknesses of currently available methodologies. In the second part, Throsby's (1995; 1999; 2001) concept of cultural capital is augmented by Austrian capital theory and analogized to the realm of natural capital in order to articulate the policy dimensions of sustainable development in cultural capital. In the third part, three quantitative metrics are then derived from the theoretical work and are empirically applied to assess and compare direct national government support for the arts in the U.S. and the U.K.. Preliminary observations are offered in the conclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article forms part of a study of the returns to investment in the ordinary shares of a group of companies quoted on the London Stock Exchange during the period 1919-1970. This paper is intended to direct attention to this new source of statistical information about British securities and to present the main output series. The method of compilation is more or less standard, apart perhaps from some refinements in the treatment of taxation. Information has been collected for each company about the share price (observed once a quarter) and about dividends, numbers of shares, issues, reorganizations, etc. These data, together with suitably adjusted rates of income tax, surtax and capital gains tax, as well as an index of retail prices, form the main inputs to the calculations. The group of companies studied is composed of the sample used in calculating Moodies' Equity Price Index, which has appeared since 1919, together with the 30 market leaders appearing in the equity studies prepared by brokers de Zoete and Bevan from 1955 onwards. The Moodies sample varies somewhat in size and composition, from 40 companies in 1919 to 60 in 1970.1970. Certain sectors of the equity market, namely mines, plantations, banks and public utilities, were excluded from both the Moodies and de Zoete groups and so are not represented here.

The aim of this research paper is to provide a simple theoretical model of a market for investment currency similar to that which existed for Great Britain residents when the regulations were in force, showing how the investment currency premium is determined and its relationship to security prices and markets. This is then used to analyze the effects on security prices and the foreign exchange markets of the abolition of the regulations. It has been shown that, ceteris paribus increased financial investment in country 2 by country 1 residents which would be expected to follow the abolition of exchange controls is exactly matched by an increased financial investment in country 1 by country 2 residents, at an unchanged official exchange rate. The market price of a country's currency in terms of other currencies is determined in the foreign exchange market. When exchange controls are in force, investors subjected to the controls are prevented from holding cash balances in anything but their own currency. In the absence of exchange controls, it will be prudent to hold money balances in a combination of currencies. The analysis would seem to indicate that, if the re-imposition of exchange control is ever contemplated again, it is unnecessary to extend this to cover the acquisition of foreign securities.

Objective: To develop an early economics evaluation (EEE) to assess the cost‐effectiveness of the GS in reducing the RoF and FoF. Methods: A cost‐effectiveness analysis (CEA) with a return on investment (RoI) estimation was performed. CEA used the most relevant parameters, such as increased gait speed and decreased FoF, to estimate the reduction in the RoF, the impact on health care resources used and financial implications for the National Health System in the United Kingdom. Outcomes were measured as incremental cost‐effectiveness ratio per quality‐adjusted life years (QALYs) gained based on the reduction of the RoF and FoF. Uncertainties around the main parameters used were evaluated by probabilistic sensitivity analysis. Results: The CEA results showed that the GS is a dominant strategy over the standard of care to improve the movements of older persons who have suffered a fall or are afraid of falling (incremental QALYs based on FoF = 0.77 and QALYs based on RoF = 1.07, cost of FoF = ‐£4479.57 and cost of RoF = ‐£2901.79). By implementing the GS, the ROI results suggest that every pound invested in the GS could result in cost savings of £1.85/patient based on the RoF reduction and £11.16/patient based on the FoF reduction. The probability of being cost saving based on the number of iterations were 79.4 percent (based on FoF) and 100 percent (based on RoF). Conclusion: The EEE supports the main hypothesis that the GS is an effective intervention to avoid falls and is potentially cost saving. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

UK energy policies position urban heat networks as components of a resilient low carbon, affordable system, but, as Stewart Russell's work showed, such technologies have never been integrated into UK provision. This paper takes Russell's legacy forward by examining prospects for urban district heating and combined heat and power development in the context of the financial, rather than technological, innovations shaped by liberalised energy and financial markets. Drawing on sociology of markets and social studies of finance, the paper examines the resulting evaluation practices. Findings indicate that such district energy infrastructure does not conform to the investment calculus, making a business case hard to establish. Bridging the value gap between liberalised finance and district energy requires actors willing to devise improvised solutions. In spite of the established sustainability credentials of the technology therefore, significant deployment in the UK (and similar countries) will depend on political leadership and new fiscal policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The literature on environmental champions emphasises the effective action of environmentally committed individuals. This paper draws on case studies of process technology investment projects in chemical and dairy companies in the UK and Sweden. The analysis is based on a political process perspective on organisations. By analysing the career histories of environmental champions as well as their behaviour in the investment projects, the paper shows how their championing behaviour is shaped by dynamic interaction with the organisational context, as well as a broader range of motivations and interests, including career opportunities and private life concerns. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper examines the degree to which current prices discount historical prices in a market for state contingent claims. Conditional logit analysis is employed to predict winning probabilities, based on market prices in a betting market. These are used, together with various wagering strategies to yield substantial abnormal returns. Consequently, in contrast to the existing literature, the results suggest that the market is not weak form efficient. The disparity with previous efficiency studies highlights the importance of considering market ecology and of adopting an appropriate modelling procedure and investment strategy to fully exploit information contained in market prices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose -- To introduce and summarize the key features of market-misconduct-related offenses in the UK with a particular focus on insider dealing. Design/methodology/approach -- Provides a detailed overview of the market abuse regime of the UK's financial regulator, the Financial Services Authority (FSA), which implements the EC Market Abuse Directive; other regulatory powers used by the FSA in cases of market misconduct; and relevant criminal law offenses. Findings -- The FSA is given a broad range of powers that enable it to bring criminal or regulatory proceedings in the UK for market misconduct. The FSA's powers have thus far been used primarily within the regulatory framework, but the FSA has said that it will be prepared to pursue certain cases through the criminal courts where behavior justifies criminal rather than regulatory action. Although the two regimes are similar, there are some differences and both regimes must therefore be considered when analyzing compliance requirements or whether market misconduct has occurred. Originality/value -- This paper is an important reference for publicly traded issuers, those who recommend investments or investment strategies, and their advisors where any investment activity is carried on with the UK or involves UK markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses how UK academics can make money from their expertise, other than through earning their salary. Using statistics from the success rate and likely remuneration from recent examples, four options are discussed: licensing their intellectual property through their institution's technology transfer office, owning shares in a 'spin-out' company personal consulting and writing books. The case of the 'average' academic who does not actively pursue any of these goals, the 'active' academic who pursues any one of them, and the top tier academic who is in the top I 0 per cent of their profession worldwide are examined. In all cases, consulting is the most economically rewarding option. For the 'average' academic, being involved in a venture-funded start-up is the worst. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the arguments for and against private‐sector financing—as opposed to operational management—of public services. Under certain conditions the costs of public and private finance will be similar, but these conditions are unlikely to hold for many public services. Using examples from the UK, we show how decisions to introduce private financing are often political, with little economic rationale. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The role of venture capital in economic development increasingly is recognized as central to the development of an entrepreneurial economy. However, the supply of venture capital is not distributed evenly across the space economy. In the UK, evidence for the 1980s demonstrated that venture capital investments were highly concentrated in Greater London and the South East, reinforcing the existing patterns of regional concentration of economic activity. This paper reviews the regional distribution of venture capital investments in the UK in the 1990s, a period of massive growth in venture capital investment activity. It concludes that the regional concentration of venture capital investment has been considerably reduced since the 1980s. However, more detailed analysis of the data demonstrates that this shift towards a less unequal regional distribution has been driven by so–called ‘merchant’ venture capital – investments in large–scale management buy–outs and buy–ins which facilitate corporate restructuring through ownership change and often have adverse consequences for employment. ‘Classic’ venture capital – investments in young entrepreneurial companies with high growth potential – remains highly concentrated in London and the South East, and also in Scotland. This reflects both supply– and demand–side factors. The Government’s new regional venture capital funds are unlikely to be effective in closing this regional finance gap. An alternative approach to intervention, in the context of the increasing globalization of venture capital investments, is to seek to attract venture capital money and expertise from elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the dynamic interactions between postwar, quarterly UK consumption, investment and income within a VAR framework. Use is made of two developments which allow sets of restrictions to be tested and imposed, and which potentially make the VAR framework much more economically interpretable. One set is placed by neoclassical growth theory and involves the presence of common stochastic trends linking the secular movement of the series (i.e. the great ratios), while the other set is placed by notions of common, or more generally, codependent cycles which have their origin in ideas of comovements between growth rates. Evidence is found to support the existence of the great ratios for the UK, and evidence is also found of a codependent cycle of order one in the growth rates of consumption, investment and income, so that although the cycles are not exactly synchronized, the response of the three growth rates to a shock will be similar from two quarters after the shock has occurred. Moreover, it is lagged consumption shocks that are primarily driving the cycle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ‘productivity puzzle’ – the substantial drop in productivity in the UK since the onset of the financial crisis in 2008 – has exercised economists and policymakers alike. The loss in productivity levels, mainly output per hour, should have been restored by now and the trend growth should have been recovered, or even exceeded. Instead after a very sharp fall, much faster than many of our competitors, it has only recently started to rise again, but at a stubbornly slow rate and at the time of writing stood some 2 per cent below its pre-recession levels. So although we are likely to get back to where we were pretty soon, it is possible that the gap, with where we should have been on pre-recession trends, continues. The Bank of England calculates this gap could stay as high as 16 per cent or even widen if the rate of productivity increase does not return to normal. This is bad for the economy and especially bad for innovation, investment, growth and competitiveness. This paper examines possible explanations and offers some possible answers. It sides, in the end, more with those that argue that demand deficiency looks like being at least a part of the explanation, but acknowledges that changes in the structure and destination of employment, since the recession started, have also played a role. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Industrial research and development activity is often regarded as one of the important contributing factors to industrial growth and the purpose of this paper is to investigate some aspects of this research and development activity. Industrial research and development expenditure is treated as a particular type of industrial investment outlay and this approach raises several interesting questions. As a first step in answering these questions information was gathered from the private industrial sector using survey methods. This effort is reported in the first section. The second section of the paper presents annual estimates of private British industrial research and development investment, and related technical knowledge estimates for the period 1948-70. Very few data are available about the characteristics and amount of industrial research and development expenditure in Britain and this study may be of some use in overcoming this data deficiency. This work, however, is limited to research and development expenditure performed or financed by the private sector.

During the nineteenth century, cotton manufacturers represented one of the most significant classes in the growing economy in Great Britain. Thus their investment habits must inevitably be of interest because of their impact on the economy as a whole and on the cotton industry in particular. A great deal of literature has been produced in recent years concerning the tendency of second and third generation mill-owners to devote an increasing proportion of their income to pursuits outside their businesses. Indeed, this has been seen to be of major significance by those discussing the causes of the deceleration of Great Britain's growth towards the end of the century. It is the aim of the article to analyse outlets, which the Gregs, a fairly typical family of cotton manufacturers, found for their surplus capital, to determine their motives and to examine how such investment diversified and expanded during the nineteenth century. The declining role of the Greg family in the cotton industry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries cannot, unreservedly, be attributed to distractions outside the firm. Extraneous factors should also be considered. Land is undoubtedly the most frequently discussed outlet for the surplus funds of the entrepreneur.

The article focuses on the business history of Sutherland family. The wealth of the Sutherland family was exercised in influential ways in nineteenth century Great Britain. It had a crucial effect on changes in transport technology in Lancashire; by this wealth was accumulated one of the finest private collections of fine art in Europe; it was employed with traumatic and transforming consequences in the Scottish Highlands; it sustained at least five major aristocratic houses including one which rivalled the royal establishment, itself; it was capital, which helped to improve agriculture on two leading Midland estates to a high peak of efficiency; it maintained a level of sheer consumption, which employed large numbers of servants and providers; it was wealth which flowed, often eccentrically, into unusual parts of the British economy, and to the rest of the world; and it subsidized the lives of a large circle of relatives in the Sutherland family. The purpose of the paper is to establish more clearly than before and for a longer period, some of the dimensions and origins of the great wealth of the Sutherland family. It seeks also to explore some of returns yielded by its investments.

The article focuses on some investment decisions of Sir W.G. Armstrong Whitworth & Co. Ltd. Because of its implications for the growth performance of the British economy before 1914, the reluctance, of many of Britain's largest firms to move into some of the more important expanding areas of engineering after 1890 is a subject which has long interested economic historians. At a general level there has been much discussion of this phenomenon, but there has been little evidence derived from business records. The purpose of this paper is to examine some of the investment decisions made between 1900 and 1914 by Sir W.G. Armstrong Whitworth & Co. Ltd. in order to shed some light on this question. An old established Tyneside engineering firm, Armstrong Whitworth was one of Great Britain's largest industrial undertakings, and by the turn of the century it was increasingly specializing in the armaments business. As economist R.C. Trebilcock has convincingly shown, the nature of the company's arms operations favours a move into one of the new industries of this period, the motor vehicle business, a move which was in fact made by Armstrong's shortly after 1900.

In this section I will not attempt to summarise the detailed argument but will evaluate the sets of criteria established by the 1967 and 1978 White Papers. In retrospect, the 1967 White Paper was probably too ambitious in its attempts to specify a general framework which would be applicable to all nationalised industries. The theoretical foundations of that document were firmly rooted in first-best Paretian welfare economics. The second-best issue was not explicitly faced and the importance of stabilisation and distributional objectives, relative to allocative ones, not assessed. Foster (1971, p. 43) detected the dilemma in the White Paper, commenting that `all arguments are qualified to the point of equivocation'. The possible inconsistency between the financial control (financial targets) and the economic controls (TDR and LRMC pricing) was recognised but never resolved. This difficulty, and the failure to transform the LRMC pricing rule into operational terms for each industry, contributed to the widespread disregard of the pricing guidelines. The insistence on the use of the TDR, the easiest part to enforce as a result of the procedures for approval of investment programmes, was half-hearted. Enforced price restraint reduced the meaning of any comparison of actual and target financial results. The overall impression of failure is difficult to resist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, after specifying the portfolio model in a term structure-demand for money context and demonstrating its implications for empirical work, we conduct a number of tests on the British data. As we will see, the mean-variance model also generates the sign expectations that M. Friedman derived for the inventory-theoretic model, a fact which suggests that one must construct the theory with rather more attention to detail in order to claim any firm empirical support for one or the other of these paradigms. In this connection, the real virtue of the portfolio model is that a three security problem can be solved--with money, a short term bond, and a long term bond in it--and the solution is sufficiently exact that it is directly estimable. The equation which is to be estimated depends on four interest rates--a contemporaneous short term rate, two expected rates, and a long term rate. The demand for money function is nonlinear in these individual interest rates, but because of the mean-variance framework employed here, the function is linear in the term structure. Moreover, there are, actually, two term structures in the model, one which relates the short term rates on money to the long term bond rate, and one which pertains to short term bond rates and the long term bond rate. We will refer to the former as the "own" (expected) term structure and the latter as the "cross" (expected) term structure (relative to the demand for money). In this paper we have developed and tested a demand for money function based explicitly on a portfolio model of investor behavior. The test was conducted on recent British data, and in the course of the empirical work we estimated two other models which incorporated interest rate expectations into the demand for money. We found that the function based on the mean-variance model outperformed the other specifications. The most interesting gain was in the apparent stability of the function over the subperiods in the data; neither... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines six strategic investments occurring in three Chinese state enterprises and three British firms matched, by types of products, with their Chinese equivalents. In both China and Britain, the form of decision processes in these large business organizations have exhibited a similar bureaucratic style, in terms of complex approval procedures, asymmetric power relations along hierarchies, multiple vertical channels for communication, and negotiating between senior and operational managers. In China, however, managerial autonomy was strictly limited by the domination of planning authorities who controlled resource allocation. The involvement of multiple external agencies, who were responsible for the economy, technology, society, and national demands, introduced a disparity of interests into investment decision-making. In Britain, managers enjoyed more autonomy to formulate investment strategies, and British firms appeared to pursue the target of profitability more explicitly, though social obligations and the perceived requirements of managers' personal careers were also critical in decision-making. These findings suggest that strategic investment decision-making is contingent on (1) the intrinsic nature derived from problem-solving processes and resource dependency; and (2) the context rationality set by both the institutional environment and culture, which pre-sets the manner of resource mobilization, regulates the role of actors, configures networks between institutions and organizations, and shapes the mode of interaction between individual and group actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's reply to the comments made by N. Rollings on his article about Keynesian revolution and economic policy-making. Rollings rightly points out the importance of practical and administrative influences in what was undoubtedly a period of great crisis and upheaval in economic policy, but he has certainly not shown that the concept of a Keynesian revolution is an inappropriate tool with which to approach an understanding of this period. Finally, attention must be turned to the overall significance of budgetary policy. Rollings has noted that if one looks beyond the budget, there is apparently evidence of the penetration of the Treasury by Keynesian analysis rather earlier than was the case with budgetary policy. He cites the case of the programming of public investment. He might equally have taken the more spectacular case of monetary policy. On May 15, 1945, Treasury officials forwarded to the Chancellor a blueprint for postwar monetary policy which was not only explicitly Keynesian in analysis but was even adorned with quotations from "The General Theory."

While there may be an important, but transitory, cyclical component in the poor performance of the past decade, we will emphasise the secular forces: the impact of demographic structure and innovation. We draw on the empirical and theoretical work reported in Aksoy, Basso, Smith and Grasl (2015), ABSG, about the impact of changes in demographic structure on macroeconomic outcomes. This suggests that changes in age profile not only have significant implications for savings, investment, real interest rates and growth but also for innovation. The size of the effects seems plausible. For instance, if in 2015 the UK had the 1970 age structure, it would have added 0.68 percentage points to the long-run annual growth rate. The model suggests that the population ageing predicted for the next decades will tend to reduce output growth and real interest rates across OECD countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports that electronic government is a burgeoning phenomenon, with huge investments being made to modernize public sector institutions at all levels. Such dramatic change is problematic in any organization, and the political, managerial and cultural environments set within government present an additional challenge. This complexity is historically founded and consistently embedded through a structure of co-operation between executive officers, elected legislative members and citizens, who form the foundations of the democratic processes. In Great Britain, the public domain is set to achieve ambitious central e-government targets for providing online information and services to its citizens by 2005. However, the emerging normative literature suggests that the deployment of e-government applications has been 'crisis driven', with public organizations needing to fully understand the benefits, costs and risks associated with delivering these services to citizens and the changes in their structure.

Historical research into the nuclear industry has focussed upon military and commercial aspects of the technology whilst ignoring fuel. This article discusses nuclear fuel, the resource at the centre of the industry and the role superpower politics played in its supply. Starting with the context of superpower competition, we examine the spread of nuclear technology from its beginnings in post-war Britain via West Germany in the 1950s to Finland in the 1960s and 1970s. We demonstrate that each country had varied interests affecting the choice of nuclear fuel for early energy projects; British fuel choices were constrained by its weapons programme and Germany needed legitimacy in the face of opposition in the 1950s. Finland was constrained by 'Finlandisation' and despite domestic enthusiasm the country had to balancing competing blocs in its choice of reactor and fuel. In short, fuel choices were constrained by local and supranational geopolitical conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After outlining some of the monetary developments associated with quantitative easing (QE), we measure the impact of the UK’s initial 2009–10 QE programme on bonds and other assets. First, we use a macro-finance yield curve both to create a counterfactual path for bond yields and to estimate the impact of QE directly. Second, we analyse the impact of individual QE operations on a range of asset prices. We find that QE significantly lowered government bond yields through the portfolio balance channel—by around 50 or so basis points. We also uncover significant effects of individual operations but limited pass-through to other assets. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Abstract: The UK government’s economy-wide 60% carbon dioxide reduction target by 2050 requires a paradigm shift in the whole energy system. Numerous analytical studies have concluded that the power sector is a critical contributor to a low carbon energy system, and electricity generation has dominated the policy discussion on UK decarbonisation scenarios. However, range of technical, social and market challenges, combined with alternate market investment strategies mean that large scale deployment of key classes of low carbon electricity technologies is fraught with uncertainty. The UK MARKAL energy systems model has been used to investigate these long-term uncertainties in key electricity generation options. A range of power sector specific parametric sensitivities have been performed under a ‘what-if’ framework to provide a systematic exploration of least-cost energy system configurations under a broad, integrated set of input assumptions. In this paper results of six sensitivities, via restricted investments in key low carbon technologies to reflect their technical and political uncertainties, and an alternate investment strategies from perceived risk and other barriers, have been presented. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]