Manchester School最新文献

In the last few decades, central bankers and economists have paid little attention to monetary aggregates, in contrast with the experience of the 1970s and the 1980s. Our evidence shows that monetary aggregates lose relevance when central banks maintain low and stable inflation, as has occurred in recent decades. However, to move from unstable to stable inflation, our findings also show that attention to monetary aggregates is needed. Our findings help resolve the long-standing controversy about the importance of monetary aggregates for the conduct of monetary policy: monetary aggregates are vital to move from unstable to stable inflation but lose relevance once a central bank has consistently reached price stability.

This study examines unfair competition among consumers according to wealth groups. The study hypothesizes that consumer groups with high income and wealth levels have a competitive advantage over consumer groups with low income and wealth levels, and therefore wealth inequality may create upward pressure on prices. Data from 37 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development member countries covering 2000–2022 were used in the analysis. According to the results of the analysis, increases in the wealth of high-wealth groups increase the inflation rate more severely.

The backdrop to this inquiry into the relationship between worker job satisfaction and workplace representation in European nations is twofold. The first is that the bulk of research has focused on union membership and job satisfaction in Anglophone nations with their very different industrial relations systems and bargaining arrangements. The second and more immediate context is the dramatic shift from negative to positive in the association between union membership and job satisfaction (inter al.) observed in the most recent literature. Using data on 28 European nations from the last two waves of the European Working Conditions Survey, however, we report that workers in establishments with formal workplace representation record lower job satisfaction than their counterparts in plants without such representation. These findings of conditional correlation are then upgraded by constructing a pseudo-panel with cohort fixed effects to take account of unobserved worker heterogeneity. First-difference estimates suggest that the negative relationship between worker representation and job satisfaction found in cross section continues to hold. Next, an endogenous treatment effects model is deployed to address the possible endogeneity of worker representation. The results are supportive of a causal negative relationship between job satisfaction and worker representation. One interpretation of our findings is that in the matter of the association between unions and job satisfaction the jury is still out.

We consider a vertically related market, in which each downstream firm produces a differentiated product by assembling a key input produced by a common supplier and another input produced by a dedicated upstream firm. On the one hand, vertical integration has the advantage of inducing the common supplier to set a lower input price, but the disadvantage of reducing downstream firms' competitiveness in the downstream market. On the other hand, vertical separation has the advantage of increasing downstream firms' competitiveness in the downstream market but the disadvantage of inducing the common supplier to set a higher input price. Contrary to results of previous studies, we find that the existence of a common supplier can lead to vertical integration under Cournot competition, which emerges as a unique equilibrium when a common supplier adopts input discrimination. Although vertical integration is better for the individual firms, it reduces the total welfare. Even when the common supplier uses uniform input pricing, vertical integration also emerges in equilibrium.

This paper analyses how migration policy changes affect the housing and location patterns of immigrants in the UK. Using the UK Longitudinal Household Survey, we examine the relationship between the 2004 EU accession as a migration policy change and housing and locational patterns. In addition to confirming the importance of migration policy frameworks, we find that liberalised migration can create a wave of immigrants with a lower propensity for homeownership and may cause the dispersion of new immigrants to locations away from the gateway cities and primary immigrant clusters such as London. The results are robust to several sensitivity tests.

This paper takes online shopping into consideration, and constructs general equilibrium models to analyze how consumers' dependence on online shopping affects rural-urban skilled-unskilled wage inequality. We find that when consumers' dependence on online shopping increases, wage inequality can be conditionally narrowed down, depending on the unskilled labor intensity in the urban manufacturing sector and the possible elasticity of the contract price.

This paper investigates the relationship between mortgage leverage and consumption around the 2008 financial crisis. Using data from the UK's Family Expenditure Survey and Wealth and Asset Survey, we first show that high-leveraged households made larger cuts to consumption following the financial crisis, and this was largely driven by young households. Second, using a life-cycle framework, we qualitatively evaluate four possible channels that could explain the observed positive relationship between consumption and leverage: income, uncertainty, credit supply and house price channels. Our key finding is that credit supply tightening is the main driver of the empirical co-movement between pre-crisis leverage and consumption growth after 2008.

This study reveals the hidden dynamics of USA-Germany international trade through a revised J-curve hypothesis. It emphasizes the inadequacy of the traditional Bilateral Trade Balance (BTB) ratio based on total exports. To this aim, it introduces two new testing approaches based on adjusted BTB: the GDP-driven-BTB-based J-curve hypothesis (GDPJ) and the Non-GDP-driven-BTB-based J-curve hypothesis (NGDPJ). The empirical findings advocate the necessity of these alternative tests, offering policymakers more informative results than the traditional approach. GDPJ is validated for 13 goods, while NGDPJ and traditional methods are validated for 10 and 8 goods. These results underscore the risks of solely relying on the traditional approach. By embracing the revised J-curve hypothesis and alternative BTBs, policymakers can gain deeper insights into the USA-Germany trade relationship. One interpretation is that, under Brexit, German consumers reduce their purchases of re-exported goods more than domestically produced goods from the US.