A new modelling strategy that provides a practical approach to incorporating long-run structural relationships, suggested by economic theory, in an otherwise unrestricted VAR model is applied to construct a small quarterly macroeconometric model of the UK, estimated over 1965q1-1999q4 in nine...

We characterise the relationships between preliminary and subsequent measurements for 16 commonly-used UK macroeconomic indicators drawn from two existing real-time data sets and a new nominal variable database. Most preliminary measurements are biased predictors of subsequent measurements, with...

A recent revision to the preliminary measurement of GDP(E) growth for 2003Q2 caused considerable press attention, provoked a public enquiry and prompted a number of reforms to UK statistical reporting procedures. In this article, we compute the probability of 'substantial revisions' that are...

That governments should delegate the operation of monetary policy to independent central banks is widely advocated. For a closed economy, the optimal choice results in a banker who is more conservative than the representative government, assigning a lower weight on output in her welfare...

This paper is concerned with two related features of the labor market-the ratio of long-term to total unemployment, R, and the relat ionship between unemployment and vacancies (the "U-V curve"). A model is developed to explain R in terms of the average probability that an unemployed person will...

This paper constructs a dynamic model of the arms trade in which there are a small number of suppliers who care about the profits from the trade and the security consequences of the sale and a large number of interacting buyers who are concerned about their security relative to regional rivals....