Immigration may impact income distribution both by affecting the skill composition of a country's residents, and, by changing relative factor supplies, its relative factor prices. We provide some background evidence on compositional factors but focus primarily on factor prices. We first consider...

Average wages are considerably lower in agriculture than in the other sectors. We document this fact for thirteen countries ranging from rich (Canada, U.S.) to poor (India, Indonesia). We develop a measure of human capital that accounts for the selection of workers with different unobserved...

There is no consensus about the causes of the reduction in business cycle volatility seen in many major economies over the last decade. Using stylised models of the economies of the US, Euro area, UK and Japan, we argue that economic stability has been fostered by improved monetary policy and by...

This paper analyses US nominal house prices at an annual frequency over the period from 1927 to 2022 by means of a very general time series model. This includes both a (linear and non-linear) deterministic and a stochastic component, with the latter allowing for fractional orders of integration...

This paper uses a seasonal long-memory model to capture the behaviour of the US Industrial Production Index (IPI) over the period 1919Q1-2022Q4. This series is found to display a large value of the periodogram at the zero, long-run frequency, and to exhibit an order of integration around 1. When...

Both in the UK and in the US, we observe puzzling gender asymmetries in the propensity to outmarry: Black men are more likely to have white spouses than Black women, but the opposite is true for Chinese: Chinese men are half less likely to be married to a White person than Chinese women. We...

This paper provides a method for the analysis of the spatial and temporal diffusion of shocks in a dynamic system. We use changes in real house prices within the UK economy at the level of regions to illustrate its use. Adjustment to shocks involves both a region specific and a spatial effect....

The current financial crisis has sparked intense debate about how weak banks should be resolved. Despite international efforts to coordinate and converge on such policies, national policy advice and resolution practices differ. The resolution methods adopted in the Nordic banking crises in the...

This paper proposes an explanation of the shifts in the volatility of exchange rate returns that relies on standard present value exchange rate models. Agents are uncertain about the true data generating model and deal with the model uncertainty by making inference on the models and their...

The paper analyses theoretically what role fiscal councils could play and surveys empirically the activities of existing councils. Case studies of the Swedish Fiscal Policy Council and the UK Office for Budget Responsibility are done. It is concluded that fiscal councils should be advisory,...