This paper empirically analyses the interest rate transmission mechanism in the United Kingdom by exploring the pass-through of the official rate to the money market rate and of the market rate to the mortgage rate. Potential asymmetries, due to financial market conditions and monetary policy,...

We investigate changes in international business cycle affiliations using an iterative procedure for detecting system-wide structural breaks. We analyze GDP growth rates in two systems, one with the US, Euro-area, UK and Canada and the other for the Euro-area countries of France, Germany and...

Theories of psychology and empirical evidence suggest that the reference transactions against which workers judge fairness exhibit inertia. This paper shows that a fair-wage model with inertia in fairness perceptions provides a plausible explanation for the observed negative correlation between...

The paper derives and compares historical and real-time estimates of the UK natural unemployment rate and shows that real-time estimates are fraught with noise and should be treated with scepticism. A counterfactual exercise shows that, for most of the 1990s, the Bank of England tracked changes...

The pattern of Spanish comparative labor productivity performance in the period 1950-2004 is underpinned by distinctive sectoral trends. From 1950 until the mid-1970s, Spain narrowed the aggregate labor productivity gap with Britain by shifting resources out of agriculture and by improving its...

This paper applies a business cycle dating algorithm to monthly North West county and local authority district claimant count data to assess turning points in the economic cycle of sub-regions. We date the transition of all districts of the North West into recession beginning in June 2007. By...

In a simple, forward looking linear stochastic model we investigate the impact of heterogeneity in expectations formation on the speed of convergence of the learning process of agents towards equilibrium. We …nd that even when heterogeneity does not a¤ect learnability in term of its...