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...

It is widely perceived that credit supply conditions faced by UK consumers, particularly in the mortgage market, have been liberalised since the late 1970s, with implications for the housing market and consumer spending. This paper examines quarterly microdata from the Survey of Mortgage Lenders...

We identify a 'risk news' shock in a vector autoregression (VAR), modifying Barsky and Sims's procedure, while incorporating sign restrictions to simultaneously identify monetary policy, technology and demand shocks. The VAR-identifed risk news shock is estimated to account for around 2%-12% of...

This paper argues that shocks increasing macroeconomic uncertainty negatively affect economic activity not only in the short but also in the long run. In a sticky-price DSGE model with endogenous growth through investment in R&D, uncertainty shocks lead to a short-term fall in demand because of...

Long-term real interest rates across the world have fallen by about 450 basis points over the past 30 years. The co-movement in rates across both advanced and emerging economies suggests a common driver: the global neutral real rate may have fallen. In this paper we attempt to identify which...

In this paper, annual indices of labor input adjusted for the education, age and gender distributions of the UK workforce are presented for the period 1975-2002. These measures show that improvement in labor quality, as proxied by education, age and gender, has added on average 0.67 percentage...

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...

The behaviour of labour productivity in the United Kingdom since the onset of the recession in early 2008 constitutes a puzzle. Over four years after the recession began labour productivity is still below its previous peak level. This paper considers the hypothesis that economic capacity can be...

Long-horizon interest rates in the major international bond markets fell sharply during 2004 and 2005, at the same time as US policy rates were rising; a phenomenon famously described as a 'conundrum' by Alan Greenspan the Federal Reserve Chairman. But it was arguably the decline in...

This paper presents a range of unobserved components models to study productivity dynamics in the United Kingdom. We introduce a set of univariate and bivariate models that allow for shocks between the trend and the cycle to be correlated, and use Bayesian sampling techniques to estimate the...