There has been growing interest in the use of financial spreads as advance indicators of real activity and inflation. Empirical evidence is marshalled on a range of spreads when these are used in vector autoregressive models of the UK and German economies. It is found that they do have...

This paper presents an analysis of the behavior of the Swiss labor market, which emphasizes both changes to labor supply and real wage inflexibility as determinants of recent unusually high levels of unemployment. Supply responses in the past meant that measured unemployment rates were rarely...

Recent applied macroeconomic research has been concerned with the effects of both labour market reforms and the delegation of monetary policy to an inflation-averse central bank as ways of improving inflation and unemployment outcomes. The experience of the UK over the recent past following the...