Measuring The UK Short-Run NAIRU

This paper derives alternative measures of the short-run NAIRU (SRN) for the UK, the rate for unemployment at which inflation will neither increase nor decrease in the short-run. We estimate the NAIRU jointly with price equations by using the Kalman filter. Our work suggests that both structural changes in the labour market and favourable supply shocks may have had a beneficial impact on RPIX inflation over the last few years. We show that deviations of unemployment from the short-run NAIRU measures prove helpful in predicting inflation and we demonstrate their usefulness in Taylor-type policy rules for the interest rate.