Publications
Type: NIESR Discussion Paper
We develop a simple model that motivates fiscal stabilisation policy, in the presence of economic and control uncertainty. An examination of a real-time database of economic variables and forecasts shows that our knowledge of the current and future state of the economy is subject to significant...
Type: NIESR Discussion Paper
Baumeister and Kilian (2015) combine forecasts from six empirical models to predict real oil prices. In this paper, we broadly reproduce their main economic findings, employing their preferred measures of the real oil price and other real-time variables. Mindful of the importance of Brent crude oil...
Type: NIESR Discussion Paper
Football is the national sport of most of the planet. This paper examines how happy the outcomes of football matches make us. We calibrate these results relative to other activities and estimate the dynamic effects these exogenous events have on our utility over time. We find that football – on...
Type: NIESR Discussion Paper
There remains a puzzle around the world over why wage growth is so benign given the unemployment rate has returned to pre-recession levels. It is our contention that a considerable part of the explanation is the rise in underemployment which rose in the Great Recession but has not returned to pre-...
Type: NIESR Discussion Paper
I review the contribution and influence of Milton Friedman’s 1968 presidential address to the American Economic Association. I argue that Friedman’s influence on the practice of central banking was profound and that his argument in favour of monetary rules was responsible for thirty years of low...
Type: NIESR Discussion Paper
In this paper we incorporate a macroprudential policy model within a semi-structural global macroeconomic model, NiGEM. The existing NiGEM model is expanded for the UK, Germany and Italy¹ to include two macroprudential tools: loan-to-value ratios on mortgage lending and variable bank capital...
Type: NIESR Discussion Paper
We study the effects of the announcements of ECB asset purchases and of financial stability measures in the euro area in the wake of the global financial crisis and the euro area sovereign debt crisis on ten-year government bond term premia in eleven euro area countries. We find that the term...
Type: NIESR Discussion Paper
We examine the impact of management practices on firm performance among SMEs in Britain over the period 2011-2014, using a unique dataset which links survey data on management practices with firm performance data from the UK’s official business register. We find that SMEs are less likely to use...
Type: NIESR Discussion Paper
We refer to the idea that government must ‘tighten its belt’ as a necessary policy response to higher indebtedness as the household fallacy. We provide a reason to be skeptical of this claim that holds even if the economy always operates at full employment and all markets clear. Our argument rests...
Type: NIESR Discussion Paper
We decompose aggregate consumption of heterogeneous consumers by modelling both savers and their links to collateral constrained borrowers through a bank which prices credit risk. Savers own both firms and the commercial bank while borrowers require loans from the commercial bank to effect their...
Type: NIESR Discussion Paper
This paper constructs a general equilibrium model where asset price fluctuations are caused by random shocks to beliefs about the future price level that reallocate consumption across generations. In this model, asset prices are volatile, and price-earnings ratios are persistent, even though there...
Type: NIESR Discussion Paper
Recent history suggests that raising interest rates higher than warranted by macroeconomic prospects would not be the right policy for financial stability. The significant tightening of monetary policies in the advanced economies from mid-2004 to mid-2006 failed to stop increased risk-taking in the...
Type: NIESR Discussion Paper
This paper investigates whether the educational choices that young people make after the completion of their GCSEs (at age 16) are influenced by their peers. More specifically, it takes advantage of the variation in peer groups that arises when students move from primary to secondary school in...
Type: NIESR Discussion Paper
We study the use of US dollar central bank swap lines as a tool for addressing dislocations in the foreign currency swap market against the USD since the global financial crisis. We find that the use of the Federal Reserve’s USD central bank swap lines was mainly related to tensions in US money...
Type: NIESR Discussion Paper
We exploit tax-induced exogenous variance in the price of union membership to identify the effects of changes in firm union density on firm productivity and wages in the population of Norwegian firms over the period 2001 to 2012. Increases in union density lead to substantial increases in firm...
Type: NIESR Discussion Paper
Behavioural endogeneity is appealing functionality for any analytical tool designed to explore the implications of public policy alternatives. This study improves the evidence base for choosing between alternative approaches for projecting decision making by exploring two key research questions: (i...
Type: NIESR Discussion Paper
This paper investigates the macroeconomic effects of UK banking crises over the period 1750 to 1938. We construct a new annual banking crisis series using bank failure rate data, which suggests that the incidence of banking crises was every 30 or so years. Using our new series and a narrative...
Type: NIESR Discussion Paper
Education and training among the working-age population has become an increasingly important policy issue as working lives have lengthened and the pace of technological change has quickened. This paper describes the effects of a reform that broadened access to public subsidies for adult Vocational...
Type: NIESR Discussion Paper
I examine the history of employee engagement and how it has been characterised by thinkers in sociology, psychology, management and economics. I suggest that, while employers may choose to invest in employee engagement, there are alternative management strategies that may be profit-maximising. I...
Type: NIESR Discussion Paper
This study investigates how the legal provisions contained in Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs) affect foreign direct investment inflows in OECD countries. This stands in contrast to the existing literature on two counts: first, we examine separate investor protection provisions contained in...
Type: NIESR Discussion Paper
Using an empirical model, this paper finds that shortening the average maturity of US Treasury debt held outside the Federal Reserve by one year reduces the five-year forward 10-year yield by between 130 and 150 basis points. Based on a pre-crisis period, these estimates suggest that portfolio...
Type: NIESR Discussion Paper
In this study, commissioned by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) we provide a comprehensive and independent review of the asset lives’ assumptions used in the computation of the UK national capital stocks. Despite being regarded as one of the key inputs feeding into the Perpetual Inventory...
Type: NIESR Discussion Paper
Economies is the extent to which a workhorse advanced economy model can yield important insights for monetary policy-making. We note that the standard sticky-price, monopolistically competitive model does not allow analysis of money and credit dynamics and led to a concentration of research on...
Type: NIESR Discussion Paper
In the aftermath of the inflation and recessions of the 1970s and early 1980s, from the early 1990s onwards there was a major upswing in most advanced countries. In the UK it was the longest period of economic expansion on record. But it came to an abrupt end in 2007, with the freezing of the...
Type: NIESR Discussion Paper
This paper uses the National Institute Global Econometric Model (NiGEM) to quantify the magnitude of fiscal spillover multipliers in each Euro Area country following a fiscal shock to one particular Euro Area country. Spillover multipliers lie between 0.01 and 0.3 per cent when the fiscal shock...
Type: NIESR Discussion Paper
The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, we review the theoretical and empirical literature on macroprudential policies and tools. Second, we test empirically the effectiveness of several macroprudential policies and tools using three datasets from the IMF and BIS that cover up to 19 OECD...
Type: NIESR Discussion Paper
This paper investigates the determinants of sovereign bond yields in the Euro Area through the lens of the expectations hypothesis adjusting for measures of risk. This allows us to see the extent to which monetary policy, which controls the path of short-term nominal interest rates, is a driver of...
Type: NIESR Discussion Paper
This paper looks at the monetary and fiscal interaction in the European Monetary Union and how the two arms of macrostabilisation policy are affected by high levels of sovereign debt and short-term interest rates at, or around, their lower bound. Using the National Institute’s Global Econometric...
Type: NIESR Discussion Paper
This article outlines some of the intellectual lessons learnt by central bankers during the financial crisis. The key question is whether a broader range of policy options than simple inflation targeting has to be considered in order to limit instability. Interactions with overseas pools of savings...
Type: NIESR Discussion Paper
This paper uses the National Institute Global Econometric Model (NiGEM) to quantify the magnitude of fiscal multipliers in each Euro Area country when fiscal policies are enacted in each country in isolation and when there is international coordination of fiscal policies. We find that fiscal...
Type: NIESR Discussion Paper
In times of decreasing mortality, one way to stabilise a PAYG pension system is to interrelate the retirement age to the anticipated average lifespan. This paper investigates two approaches for Germany: one is to keep the average retirement duration constant, the other to define a constant share of...
Type: NIESR Discussion Paper
This paper describes how the parameters of the Lifetime INcome Distributional Analysis (LINDA) microsimulation model were defined to reflect survey data for the UK. LINDA is a dynamic programming model of savings and labour supply decisions that has been developed for use by UK policy makers. The...
Type: NIESR Discussion Paper
Responding to the challenges of demographic ageing, the German system of old-age provision has undergone substantial changes during the last two decades and is in fact still under reconstruction. Benefit levels deriving from the public pay-as-you-go scheme will decline until 2060, while...
Type: NIESR Discussion Paper
We model the long-term implications of leaving the EU for the UK economy using NiGEM, the National Institute’s large scale structural global econometric model. We examine a scenario in which the UK has no free trade agreement with the EU, focusing on four key shocks: a permanent reduction in the...
Type: NIESR Discussion Paper
This paper presents a framework for modelling important socio-economic events in order to provide an informative counterfactual. This involves mapping the deep underlying shock associated with the event itself into a series of more tractable shocks consistent with the model being applied and...
Type: NIESR Discussion Paper
This paper looks at the possible scenarios of migration policy should the UK leave the EU. The paper uses an OLG model which brings together labour market, fiscal and other macroeconomic effects in one framework. It also adds a dynamic perspective, differentiates between natives and different...
Type: NIESR Discussion Paper
This paper describes a structural dynamic microsimulation model that generates individual-specifi
c data over a range of demographic and economic characteristics at discrete intervals through-out a simulated time horizon. The model is designed to analyse the distributional implications of policy...
Type: NIESR Discussion Paper
Radical changes have been implemented to pension schemes across the UK public sector from April 2015. This paper simulates how these changes will affect the lifetime pension and how the negotiated pension changes compare across six public sector schemes by level of education. Specifically, we...
Type: NIESR Discussion Paper
It is generally accepted that people prefer to receive reward earlier rather than later. A positive rate of time preference is routinely used in economic models of intertemporal choice, for example OLG-CGE models. Calibrating an OLG-CGE model is challenging because age-profile data is usually not...
Type: NIESR Discussion Paper
This paper analyses the long-term sustainability and intergenerational equity of the Scottish public finances by employing a generational accounting model. This represents a novel approach to analysing these issues in the case of Scotland, while having the advantage of capturing policy-relevant...
Type: NIESR Discussion Paper
This paper examines how young people’s early transitions into the labour market have changed between cohorts born in 1958, 1970, 1980, and 1990. We use sequence analysis to characterise transition patterns and identify three distinct pathways in all cohorts. An ‘Entering the Labour Market’ group...
Type: NIESR Discussion Paper
The Government has recently issued a consultation document which raises the possibility of a substantial change in the taxation of pensions.[1] In this paper we assess the economic consequences of changing from the existing EET system (where pension savings and returns are exempt from income tax...
Type: NIESR Discussion Paper
Young people from less advantaged backgrounds are less likely to enter a “professional” job on leaving university (Macmillan et al., 2013). However, this does not tell us about the performance of those who do. This paper considers the relative salary growth of graduates that secure a high-status...
Type: NIESR Discussion Paper
Drawing on principal-agent perspectives on corporate governance, this paper examines whether employees’ hourly pay is linked to ownership dispersion. Using linked workplace-worker data from the British Workplace Employment Relations Survey (WERS) 2011, we find average hourly pay is higher in...
Type: NIESR Discussion Paper
This paper uses a UK nationally representative data set to examine the extent to which family migration history helps explains inter-ethnic variations in subjective well-being. We confirm that there is significant variation in well-being across ethnic group and across migrant generations. On...
Type: NIESR Discussion Paper
In many larger advanced economies labour productivity growth slowed sharply and remained subdued for years after the credit crisis of 2007/08. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the UK. We examine the dynamics of productivity among British businesses that lie behind this stagnation. The most...
Type: NIESR Discussion Paper
This paper exploits the introduction of the National Minimum Wage (NMW) in Britain and subsequent increases in the NMW to identify the effects of minimum wages on productivity. We find that the NMW increased average labour costs for companies that tend to employ low paid workers, both upon the...
Type: NIESR Discussion Paper
The 2008 Great Recession was notable in the UK for three things: the enormity of the output shock; the muted unemployment response; and the very slow rate of recovery. We review the literature which finds most of the decline in productivity is within sector and within firm before presenting new...
Type: NIESR Discussion Paper
This paper uses linked employer-employee data to investigate the relationship between employees’ subjective well-being and workplace performance in Britain. The analyses show a clear, positive and statistically-significant relationship between the average level of job satisfaction at the workplace...
Type: NIESR Discussion Paper
Using data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) we show performance pay (PP) increased earnings dispersion among men and women, and to a lesser extent among full-time working women, in the decade of economic growth which ended with the recession of 2008. PP was also associated with some...
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