Recent attention has focused on the UK's productivity gap in the retail sector. Figure 1 shows an estimate of labour productivity in retail across countries, using output per hour worked. The UK lies well behind the US, France and Germany. Reynolds at al (2005) contribute to this debate by...

Many macroeconometric models depict situations where the shares of the major demand aggregates in output are stable over time. The joint dynamic behavior of the considered demand aggregate and output may thus be approximated by a cointegrated vector autoregression. However, the shares of many...

In this paper we challenge the traditional labour market view, which argues that unemployment is determined in the long-term by its equilibrium rate, which in turn is affected by permanent shocks of some exogenous variables. In our empirical approach we decompose the dynamics of employment and...

The expansion of Western European production accelerated in the first half of 1997. Exports were the main engine, driven by a devaluation of European currencies and strong growth abroad. Domestic demand also picked up somewhat led by investment in machinery and equipment. Inflation remained at...

This study explores a new modelling approach that bridges the gap between multilateral country-level data and the bilateral-model based, goods-market specific purchasing power parity (PPP) hypothesis. Under this approach, PPP is embedded in latent common factors, extractable from a large set of...

Research efforts towards new energy sources and towards the efficiency of energy use will be vital to reducing CO2 abatement costs in the long term. Can such efforts be induced by price instruments? Economists often cite induced technological change as a possible consequence of environmental...

This paper investigates the relevance of the sticky information model of Mankiw and Reis (2002) and Carroll (2003) for four major European economies (France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom). As opposed to the benchmark rational expectation models, households in the sticky information...