Forecasting near-term trends in the labour market

Harvey Daniell and Andre Moreira

The latest developments in the labour market are often central to monetary policy decisions. We outline a framework for mapping labour market indicators to near-term employment and pay growth, drawing on established insights from the ‘nowcasting’ literature. The key benefits of our approach are: the ability to map a range of ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ indicators of different frequencies to quarterly official data; the empirical determination of how much weight to place on each indicator; and the ability to shift those weights flexibly as more data become available. This framework beats simple benchmark models in our labour market application.

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What types of businesses have used government support during the Covid-19 pandemic?

Will Banks, Sudipto Karmakar and Danny Walker

This post is the first of a series of posts about the Covid-19 pandemic and its impact on business activity.

During the pandemic, UK businesses have received unprecedented levels of government support, set to total 9% of GDP. This has mainly been through the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS), under which 1 in 3 employees have been furloughed, and the government-guaranteed loan schemes that were used by 1 in 4 businesses. Despite the scale of this support, little has been said about which businesses received it. In this post we combine data on loan scheme and CJRS usage with a data set on the characteristics of businesses. We find that small, relatively old and sophisticated, labour-intensive businesses in the sectors most vulnerable to the impacts of the pandemic are most likely to have received both types of support.

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Diffraction through debt: the cash-flow effect of monetary policy

Fergus Cumming.

As the UK economy went into recession in 2008, the Monetary Policy Committee responded with a 400 basis point reduction in Bank Rate between October 2008 and March 2009. Although this easing lessened the impact of the recession across the whole economy, its cash-flow effect would have initially benefited some households more than others. Those holding large debt contracts with repayments closely linked to policy rates immediately received substantial boosts to their disposable income. Cheaper mortgage repayments meant more pounds in peoples’ pockets, and this supported both spending and employment in 2009. In this article I explore one element of the monetary transmission mechanism that works through cash-flow effects associated with the mortgage market, and show that it can vary across both time and space.

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How do firms adjust to falls in demand?

Srdan Tatomir.

How do firms response to falls in demand for their products in the real world? Do they cut wages? Or are they able only to freeze them? What other methods can they use to adjust their labour costs? And does any of this matter? The answer to the final question is emphatically yes. How firms adjust the quantity and cost of their labour input, particularly in response to a downturn, is relevant for monetary policy. If firms are unable to cut wages – what economists call ‘downward nominal wage rigidity’ (DNWR) – then they have to reduce the number of employees, increasing unemployment, further depressing output and weighing on inflation.

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