The paper studies the dynamics of rational maps with indifferent parabolic points by comparing their dynamical properties with those of their ‘jump transformation’ which is uniformly expanding on a non-compact set with infinite Markov partition. It establishes the spectral properties of a two-variables operator-valued function associated to the jump transformation and exploits their dynamical relevance to allow the analytic properties of the pressure, the escape rate from a neighbourhood of the Julia set and the asymptotic distribution of pre-images to be studied.