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 challenges what is the standard account of UK unemployment, namely that the major swings in unemployment over the past 25 years are due predominantly to movements in the underlying empirical "natural rate of unemploymentʺ (NRU). Our analysis suggests that the British NRU has remained...

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...

This paper challenges what is the standard account of UK unemployment, namely that the major swings in unemployment over the past 25 years are due predominantly to movements in the underlying empirical “natural rate of unemployment” (NRU). Our analysis suggests that the British NRU has...

This article is concerned with the dynamic behaviour of UK unemployment. However, instead of using traditional approaches based on I(0) stationary or I(1) (integrated and/or cointegrated) models, we use the fractional integration framework. In doing so, we allow for a more careful study of the...

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...

Adjustment Dynamics and the Natural Rate: An Account of UK Unemployment. This paper challenges what is the standard account of UK unemployment, namely that the major swings in unemployment over the past 25 years are due predominantly to movements in the underlying empirical "natural rate of...