The UK has experienced a dramatic increase in earnings and income inequality over the past four decades. We use detailed micro level information to construct historical measures of inequality from 1968 to 2008. We study whether monetary policy shocks played a significant role in explaining this...

A growing empirical literature has considered the impact of uncertainty using SVAR models that include proxies for uncertainty shocks as endogenous variables. In this paper we consider the possible impact of measurement error in the uncertainty shock proxies on the estimated impulse responses...

The aim of this paper is to gauge the importance of foreign demand, supply and interest rate shocks on the UK economy and assess how their role has changed over time. To that end we devise a time-varying factor augmented VAR model that captures the relationship between 17 industrialised...

A growing literature has documented changes to the dynamics of key macroeconomic variables in industrialised countries and highlighted the possibility that these variables may react differently to structural shocks over time. However, existing empirical work on the international transmission of...

This paper aims to address the issue of public pension reforms under demographic ageing that is likely to occur in Europe over the next 50 years. Three possible scenarios are analysed in a Blanchard OLG framework. These include: i) a decrease both in public pensions and the lump sum labour...

Whether pension reforms lead to an improvement in macroeconomic performance is a controversial question. Some countries, which have implemented reforms, claim better economic performance while in others a positive result has yet to be seen. This paper explores two aspects of this issue further:...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate how changes in the distribution of pre retirement labour earnings affect post-retirement income in the UK. Design/methodology/approach – The authors estimate a PROBIT model and perform a counterfactual simulation to assess the effects of...

The dynamics of the US economy are modelled using a time-varying structural vector autoregression that incorporates information from the yield curve. We find important changes in the dynamics of macroeconomic variables such as inflation and the federal funds rate. In addition our results suggest...

This article summarizes our views on the role of an 'aggregation bias' in explaining the PPP Puzzle, in response to the several papers recently written in reaction to our initial contribution. We discuss in particular the criticisms of Imbs, Mumtaz, Ravn and Rey (2002) presented in Chen and...

We show the importance of a dynamic aggregation bias in accounting for the PPP puzzle. We prove that established time-series and panel methods substantially exaggerate the persistence of real exchange rates because of heterogeneity in the dynamics of disaggregated relative prices. When...