The severe recession of the past year might be expected to have put the financial position of British households under considerable strain. Unemployment has risen significantly, credit conditions have tightened and many homeowners have seen their housing equity eroded. But many borrowers have...

This paper studies the impact of different types and styles of Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) communication on asset prices (stock prices, gilt yields and interest rate futures) from 1999-2023. We extend MPC communication to include MPC speeches and find MPC speeches to be an...

Firms with high pre-crisis cash holdings invested significantly more than their cash-poor rivals during the global financial crisis and especially so during the recovery phase. This resulted in a persistent and growing investment gap between cash-rich and cash-poor firms. Cash especially...

This paper asks whether immigration to Britain has had any impact on average wages. There seems to be a broad consensus among academics that the share of immigrants in the workforce has little or no effect on native wages. These studies typically have not refined their analysis by breaking it...

UK population growth over the last thirty-five years has been remarkably low in comparison with other countries; the population grew by just 7% between 1971 and 2004, less than all the other EU15 countries except Germany. The UK population has grown at a faster pace since the turn of the...

In the workhorse model of international real business cycles, financial integration exacerbates the cycle asymmetry created by country-specific supply shocks. The prediction is identical in response to purely common shocks in the same model augmented with simple country heterogeneity (eg, where...

This paper asks whether immigration to Britain has had any impact on average wages. There seems to be a broad consensus among academics that the share of immigrants in the workforce has little or no effect on the pay rates of the indigenous population. But the studies in the literature have...

In this paper, the Kalman filter method is applied to UK Phillips-curve models and estimates are derived for the NAIRU from 1973 to 2000. The resulting profiles suggest that the NAIRU peaked around the mid-1980s and fell back thereafter. Structural changes in the labour market have reduced...