Fluctuations in the labour force participation rate in the short to medium run are an important determinant of the cyclical behaviour of the unemployment rate, and hence wage pressures in the economy. This paper takes a closer look at the cyclical behaviour of labour force participation in the...

We follow Fuhrer (2000) in estimating via Maximum Likelihood a log-linear consumption function on UK data. In doing so we consider various habit formation assumptions. We show that a model of purely “external” habits as in Fuhrer (2000) fits the UK data remarkably well, and possibly in a...

Industrial prices of goods and services are a function of costs of production and of the mark-up that firms apply on those costs. If these prices relate to goods that are traded internationally, they will also be influenced by the price at which those goods are exchanged in international...

This paper updates and extends Friedman’s (1972) evidence on the lag between monetary policy actions and the response of inflation. Our evidence is based on UK and US data for the period 1953–2001 on money growth rates, inflation, and interest rates, as well as annual data on money growth...

This paper extends the existing literature on the uniqueness and stability conditions for an equilibrium under inflation-forecast-based (IFB) rules. It shows that, for a variety of New Keynesian sticky-price and sticky-inflation models, these are a function not just of the degree of...

In recent years UK real wages have been growing faster than labour factor productivity, implying that the labour share has been rising. This paper looks at various definitions of the labour share and derives a measure for the UK, which appears positively correlated with the growth rate of the UK...

This paper derives alternative measures of the short-run NAIRU (SRN) for the UK, the rate for unemployment at which inflation will neither increase nor decrease in the short-run. We estimate the NAIRU jointly with price equations by using the Kalman filter. Our work suggests that both structural...

We study whether the accuracy of real-time estimates of the output gap produced by the OECD has improved over time by examining a panel dataset on real-time output gap revisions for 15 countries from 1991 Q1 — 2005 Q4. We use a simple panel data regression and a state space model, with common...

This paper develops a model of the housing market that takes account of population density to assess the impact of population changes on the value and size of the housing stock. The model implies that if population density is on an upward trajectory, rises in population and in incomes...