Central bankers are likely to miss important trends if they fail to account for changes that show up only on a micro level, the Bank of England's (BoE) deputy governor for monetary policy, Ben Broadbent, warned on September 23.

Broadbent approached the problem from the perspective of unemployment, which has been falling in recent years without being accompanied by significant pay increases. As the BoE noted in its May inflation report, part of this seems to be due to "compositional factors" –