The myths and realities of structural change in the UK labour market

Recent discussion of developments within the UK labour market has highlighted the growth of more 'flexible' types of employment: part-time work, temporary jobs, and self-employment. The structure of employment has also been shifting – away from manufacturing and manual employment and towards the service sector and non-manual employment. In this article, Peter Robinson argues that these are not new developments and in some respects the pace of structural change in the labour market has slowed down. Together with evidence that the labour market is now adapting successfully to earlier structural changes, this bodes well for the prospect of further gradual reductions in unemployment.     

The Rhetoric of Modernization and the Labour Government's Pay Agenda

The modernization agenda is central to New Labour's desire to improve public services and reforming public sector pay is argued to be a fundamental requirement to delivering such improvement. This article argues that both the modernization agenda and pay reform have a rhetorical function. The authors analyse some short extracts of text from the NHS Agenda for Change on pay reform and show that much of the text requires unstated assumptions and premises to be added by the reader to render the arguments of the text to be fully coherent. Reaction to these unstated aspects of the Government's rhetoric are central to whether modernization is approved of or not.     

A bivariate Poisson count data model using conditional probabilities

The applied econometrics of bivariate count data predominantly focus on a bivariate Poisson density with a correlation structure that is very restrictive. The main limitation is that this bivariate distribution excludes zero and negative correlation. This paper introduces a new model which allows for a more flexible correlation structure. To this end the joint density is decomposed by means of the multiplication rule in marginal and conditional densities. Simulation experiments and an application of the model to recreational data are presented.     

A NEW METHOD OF PRICING LOOKBACK OPTIONS

A new method for pricing lookback options (a.k.a. hindsight options) is presented, which simplifies the derivation of analytical formulas for this class of exotics in the Black-Scholes framework. Underlying the method is the observation that a lookback option can be considered as an integrated form of a related barrier option. The integrations with respect to the barrier price are evaluated at the expiry date to derive the payoff of an equivalent portfolio of European-type binary options. The arbitrage-free price of the lookback option can then be evaluated by static replication as the present value of this portfolio. We illustrate the method by deriving expressions for generic, standard floating-, fixed-, and reverse-strike lookbacks, and then show how the method can be used to price the more complex partial-price and partial-time lookback options. The method is in principle applicable to frameworks with alternative asset-price dynamics to the Black-Scholes world.     

The Growth of Jobless Households in Australia

In this article it is shown that individual-based measures of joblessness and household measures of joblessness have diverged over the last twenty years with joblessness becoming increasingly concentrated in certain households.     

Stochastic Volatility for Lévy Processes

Three processes reflecting persistence of volatility are initially formulated by evaluating three Lévy processes at a time change given by the integral of a mean-reverting square root process. The model for the mean-reverting time change is then generalized to include non-Gaussian models that are solutions to Ornstein-Uhlenbeck equations driven by one-sided discontinuous Lévy processes permitting correlation with the stock. Positive stock price processes are obtained by exponentiating and mean correcting these processes, or alternatively by stochastically exponentiating these processes. The characteristic functions for the log price can be used to yield option prices via the fast Fourier transform. In general mean-corrected exponentiation performs better than employing the stochastic exponential. It is observed that the mean-corrected exponential model is not a martingale in the filtration in which it is originally defined. This leads us to formulate and investigate the important property of martingale marginals where we seek martingales in altered filtrations consistent with the one-dimensional marginal distributions of the level of the process at each future date.     

How Good Are the UK VAT Registration Data at Measuring Firm Births?

This paper utilises some data from a survey of recent VAT registrations in the North of England to examine two issues: first, the extent to which registrants are involved in setting up entirely new businesses; and secondly, the relationship between the date of registration and the start of trading. The paper suggests that some caution should be exercised in the use of VAT registration statistics in the analysis of firm births.