After a dramatic slowdown of the 1970s, productivity growth in UK manufacturing in the 1980s returned to something like its pre-slowdown trend. This paper constructs a quarterly dynamic model of TFP growth in UK manufacturing using cointegration techniques, correcting for a variety of...

By assuming Cobb-Douglas production technology, many well-known imperfectly competitive macroeconomic models of the labour market (e.g. Layard, Nickell and Jackman, 1991) imply that equilibrium unemployment is independent of the capital stock. This paper introduces a new notion of capacity into...

The paper compares Feinstein`s and Clark`s consumer price and real wage indices for the British industrial revolution. The sources for their weights and component price series are evaluated. While some of Clark`s innovations are improvements, many of his changes degrade the price index. A new...

Fiscal councils now exist in a number of countries.  This paper first considers the extent of deficit bias, potential explanations for it, and how independent institutions could help reduce it.  Are fiscal councils complements to or substitutes for fiscal rules, and why do none at  present...

The apparent success of independent central banks in conducting monetary policy has led many to argue that some form of policy delegation should also be applied to the macroeconomic aspects of fiscal policy.  A number of countries have recently established Fiscal Councils, although their role...

This paper extends and modifies the Keynesian critique of inflation targeting with reference to stabilisation policy in emerging market economies. The IMF `basic monetary programming framework` for developing countries uses government borrowing and the exchange rate as policy instruments in...

In his Nobel lecture, Friedman built on his earlier argument for a 'natural rate of unemployment' by painting a picture of an economics profession which, as a result of foolish mistakes, had accepted the Phillips curve as offering a lasting trade-off between inflation and unemployment and were...

In a recent paper we have introduced the class of realised kernel estimators of the increments of quadratic variation in the presence of noise. We showed that this estimator is consistent and derived its limit distribution under various assumptions on the kernel weights. In this paper we extend...

For financial assets whose best quotes almost always change by jumping by the market`s price tick size (one cent, five cents, etc.), this paper proposes an estimator of Quadratic Variation which controls for microstructure effects. It measures the prevalence of alternations, where quotes jump...

We analyze the time-series of prices in the Spanish electricity market by means of a time varying-transition-probabilities Markov Switching model. Accounting for demand and supply conditions, we show that the time-series of prices is characterized by two significantly different price levels....