The recession of 2008-09 inflicted a larger cumulative loss of UK output than any of the previous post-war recessions, yet there has been a relatively low loss of employment, at least so far. Paul Gregg and Jonathan Wadsworth look for an explanation.

This paper examines how employees' experiences of, and attitudes towards, work have changed over the last quarter of a century. It assesses the extent to which any developments relate to the economic cycle and to trends in the composition of the British workforce. Many of the findings are...

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...

Henry Overman surveys the evidence on potentially effective responses to the recession and longer-term structural change.

Despite its potential to raise productivity, performance-related-pay (PRP) is not widespread in market-oriented economies. Furthermore, despite secular changes conducive to its take-up, there is mixed evidence as to whether it has become more prominent over time. Ours is the first paper to...

We estimate the impulse response of key US macro series to the monetary policy shocks identified by Romer and Romer (2004), allowing the response to depend flexibly on the state of the business cycle. We find strong evidence that the effects of monetary policy on real and nominal variables are...

The US economy is still suffering from its most severe recession in seven decades. In the first of a series of US Election Analyses, Ethan Ilzetzki covers the key issue of taxes, spending and public debt, a major point of disagreement between the two candidates, President Obama and Governor Romney.

Until some political mechanism creates incentives to elect moderate representatives who can reach across the ideological divide, the US seems destined to heightened levels of policy uncertainty for many years to come. Some research suggests that such uncertainty, particularly over economic...

The rise in joblessness among young people began long before the recession - Barbara Petrongolo and John Van Reenen consider potential explanations.

There are large variations in economic performance across UK cities and on some measures, they have widened since the global financial crisis. All main parties promise action to reduce them, but there is little difference between them in terms of the policies that they would pursue to meet this...