Microfounded macromodels (SDGE models) represent the dominant approach in academic macroeconomics, and their influence now extends to the forecasting models of central banks.  These models appear to adopt a clear methodological approach, which promotes internal consistency above external...

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 principles of how best to manage the various components of national wealth are outlined, where the permanent income hypothesis, the Hotelling rule and the Hartwick rule play a prominent role. As far as managing natural resource wealth is concerned, a case is made to use an intergenerational...

Gravity equations in trade imply that trade flows are proportional to the size of a country and inversely proportional to distance.  This paper develops an analogy of these observations with gravity in physics, and provides geometric intuition for a large class of mathematical processes in two...

Models of macroeconomic learning are populated by agents who possess a great deal of knowledge of the "true" structure of the economy, and yet ignore the impact of their own learning on that structure; they may learn about an equilibrium, but they do not learn within it.  An alternative learning...

Saddlepath learning occurs when agents learn adaptively using a perceived law of motion that has the same form as the saddlepath relationship in rational expectations equilibrium.  Under saddlepath learning, we obtain a completely general relationship between determinacy and e-stability, and...

This paper explores the effect of news shocks on the current account and other macroeconomic variables using worldwide giant oil discoveries as a directly observable measure of news shocks about future output - the delay between a discovery and production is on average 4 to 6 years.  We first...

Little is known about the possible impact of an influenza pandemic on a nation's economy.  We applied the UK macroeconomic model 'COMPACT' to epidemiological data on previous UK influenza pandemics, and extrapolated a sensitivity analysis to cover more extreme disease scenarios.  Analysis...

This paper investigates the success of the well-known reverse-shooting and forward-shooting algorithms in finding stable solutions for linear macroeconomic models that both possess the particular property known as saddle-path instabiity and also have highly cyclic dynamic properties. It is...

A Layard/Nickell imperfect competition model is used to derive the long-run Phillips Curve (LRPC).