Current Work

Really interesting session on New Evidence on the Surprise Surge in Inflation including our latest paper Firming Up Price Inflation, Expectations and Uncertainty was presented to the AEA Meetings in New Orleans, 2023; other papers by Ricardo Reis, Yuriy Goridnichenko, Rudi Bachmann. There is a webcast available . Papers are forthcoming American Economic Association Papers & Proceedings, May 2023.

Some very nice findings in a paper with Jan Eberly (Northwestern) and Jonathan Haskel (Imperial and Bank of England) on potential capital are available in a NBER working paper and an ITIF webinar on Will Productivity And Growth Return After Covid? and a VMACS webinar. This work was featured in The Sunday Times and The Economist. It also appeared in the ESCoE discussion paper series. Extensions to this work have been funded by the ESRC flagship Productivity Institute.

Forecast performance of better managed firms is evaluated versus their less well managed peers in this NBER working paper NBER working paper also in the ESCoE discussion paper series.

A new Working From Home (WFH) survey has been launched in December 2020. We reveal attitudes towards working from home have changed substantially since the start of the pandemic. Our survey of 2,500 working adults per month in the UK since December 2020 show a huge increase in the UK labour force working from home during Covid-19 and the majority would like to continue to work from home 2-3 days per week post-COVID, with implications for many large and medium-sized businesses. Early results on VoxEU. Write ups in The Guardian and the Sunday Times.

A joint Bank of England-ONS-UKRI Covid-19 grant with combined value of £1.1m has been awarded to address The Impact of Covid-19 on UK Businesses. Some of our first results are here and reasons why uncertainty is so damaging for the UK economy here. We also have a NBER working paper and Bank of England working paper showing how uncertain businesses are in the UK and US economies. And a further assessment of the Covid-19 impact on productivity in another NBER working paper.

Working with the D2N2 Local Enterprise Partnership and the Midlands Engine to understand the local impact of Covid on businesses in the East Midlands, and provide a data solution that could be developed more widely to provide local planning with intelligence on business responses. Midlands Engine Monitor reports our findings here.

A new project underway seeks to develop the Nottingham Productivity Network led by Kneller (UoN Productivity Champion) and funded initially by the ESRC IAA into an Interdisciplinary Research Cluster led by Richard Kneller, Cher Li and Paul Mizen. This is a group of over 80 academic and non-academic staff that work on productivity related issues, drawn from across the Social Sciences, Arts, Engineering, Science and Medicine and Health Sciences in the East and West Midlands. This is linked to the ESRC ProPEL Evidence Hub, supported by ESRC with £1.5 million as part of the UK Research and Innovation’s (UKRI) Strategic Priorities Fund.

The ESRC awarded £1.1m to conduct a second wave and analysis of the results.of a Management and Expectations Survey with the Office for National Statistics Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence. The original survey was part of a successful 2017 NIESR bid in collaboration with Nick Bloom (Stanford), Tatsuro Senga (QMUL) and Phil Wales (ONS). The first wave of the survey of 25,000 firms has been collected, cleaned and is under analysis and was presented at the ESCoE Economic Measurement conference 2019 by Phil Wales here. The results have been used to inform the Call for Evidence in the British Productivity Review. The latest ESCoE working paper is here.

The Decision Maker Panel has received £1.3m funding from various sources including the ESRC, the Bank of England, the University of Nottingham and Stanford University. I am Principal Investigator (PI) on this project 2017-2020 with Professor Nick Bloom. It is being used to inform the Bank of England, HM Treasury and the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy about economic uncertainty and Brexit. The presentation to ESCoE Economic Measurement 2018 conference by Nick Bloom is here, and the Becker-Friedman Institute conference presentation, Chicago, October 2018 is here. A full description is available in Fiscal Studies. We submitted evidence to the British Productivity Review. In 2021, the Decision Maker Panel was a Prize Finalist in the ESRC Celebrating Impact Awards at The Royal Society, for which ESRC sponsored the production of a short introductory film.

Reviewing the interest rate setting behaviour of UK banks after the financial crisis. In work with the Bank of England I have explored the impact of funding environment and competition on rate setting for fixed rate mortgages and deposits by the big six UK banks. We find transfer pricing inside each bank links individual bank funding costs to retail rates but competition limits banks’ ability to drive retail rates away from the market average.

Central banks have been puzzled why bank lending rates diverged from policy rates. In recent work with the Bank for International Settlements I explain why this is the case.In Ireland the Finance Minister, Michael Noonan, scheduled meetings with the heads of banks over this very issue - see more on my impact page (left).

My work using bond market spreads to predict recessions (Economic Journal 2016) shows financial markets often anticipate changes in real activity up to two years ahead. More work on the CDS market shows similar characteristics, and links the widening of spreads to credit events and changes in market liquidity.