The prices of derivatives contracts can be used to estimate ‘risk-neutral' probability density functions that give an indication of the weight investors place on different future prices of their underlying assets, were they risk-neutral. In the likely case that investors are risk-averse, this...

This paper explores the influence of some key institutional features of the labour market on aggregate fluctuations. It uses a dynamic, stochastic, general equilibrium model characterised by search and matching frictions in the labour market and nominal rigidities in the goods market. It finds...

The unemployment rate is commonly assumed to measure labour availability, but this ignores the fact that potential workers frequently come from outside the current set of labour market participants, the so-called inactive. The UK Longitudinal Labour Force Survey includes information that can be...

We propose a generic workflow for the use of machine learning models to inform decision making and to communicate modelling results with stakeholders. It involves three steps: (1) a comparative model evaluation, (2) a feature importance analysis and (3) statistical inference based on Shapley...

This paper investigates how compositional changes in the UK labour market affect the matching process between vacancies and job seekers. We augment a state space representation of the aggregate matching function with a measure of job seekers' ‘search intensity' that is recovered from...

Against the backdrop of continuing adjustment in EU labour markets in response to the Great Recession and the sovereign debt crisis, the European System of Central Banks (ESCB) conducted the third wave of the Wage Dynamics Network (WDN) survey in 2014–15 as a follow-up to the two previous WDN...

The notion that the long-term unemployed are relatively detached from the labour market and therefore exert only little downward pressure on wage inflation has regained significant traction recently. This paper investigates whether the conclusion that long-term unemployment is only weakly...

Mismatch in the labour market has been implicated as a driver of the UK's productivity ‘puzzle', the phenomenon describing how the growth rate and level of UK productivity have fallen behind their respective pre-Great Financial Crisis trends. Using a new dataset of around 15 million job...

In this paper we examine the impact of non-trading firms on labour productivity and its persistence in response to macroeconomic shocks, through their entry and exit into the domestic market, in a model with monopolistic competition and heterogeneous firms. We quantify the effects of various...

When the economy is in a liquidity trap and households have a precautionary motive to save against unemployment risk, adverse demand shocks cause severe deflationary spirals and output contractions. In this context, we study the implications of optimal monetary policy, which consists of keeping...