Bonus episode: understanding pay and labour market tightness

Josh Martin

Everyone likes a bonus – be it a bonus in pay, or a bonus episode for your favourite TV show. Everyone, that is, except statisticians. Bonuses are hard to define and measure and are often excluded from data on pay. But bonuses could be really important to understand labour market tightness – a topic of much interest at the moment. This blog takes a quick walk through some pay measures, highlighting the role of bonuses, and exploring what has happened to bonuses before, during and since the pandemic.

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Stirred, not shaken: how market interest rates have been reacting to economic data surprises

Jeremy Franklin, Scott Woldum, Oliver Wood and Alex Parsons

How do markets react to the release of economic data? We use a set of machine learning and statistical algorithms to try to find out. In the period since the EU referendum, we find that UK data outturns have generally been more positive than market expectations immediately prior to their release. At the same time, the responsiveness of market interest rates to those data surprises fell below historic averages. The sensitivity of market rates has also been below historic averages in the US and Euro area, suggesting international factors may also have played a role. But there are some signs that the sensitivity has increased over the past year in the UK.

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