In this joint Bank of England and Behavioural Insights Team study, we test the effectiveness of different approaches to central bank communications. Using an online experiment with a representative sample of the UK population, we measure how changes to the Bank of England's summaries of the...

This paper investigates whether working under competitive or cooperative incentives affects deception in a subsequent, unrelated task. I use a laboratory study with two stages. First, participants work under a piece rate, tournament or team incentive in a real effort task. The second part...

Our study takes an individual perspective on receiver credulity in a public good setting with deceptive messages. In a laboratory experiment, subjects play a public good game with punishment in which feedback on actual contributions is obscured. Instead, subjects can communicate what they have...

This rapid literature review was carried out to inform the design of a series of Business Basics messaging trials. The review resulted in 2 key findings. 1. It identified multiple behavioural factors that affect whether firms adopt technology and management practices, for example:...

The banking reforms that followed the financial crisis of 2007–08 led to an increase in UK banking regulation from almost 400,000 to over 720,000 words, and to concerns about their complexity. We define complexity in terms of the difficulty of processing linguistic units, both in isolation and...

We introduce a novel data set to analyze the impact of the Covid-19 crisis on SME cash flows. The crisis led to a sharp drop in economic activity in the UK, which hit SMEs harder than larger businesses. The data set comprises monthly information on all 2 million SMEs that have current accounts...

The Covid-19 crisis led to a sharp drop in economic activity in the UK, which hit small and medium enterprises (SMEs) harder than larger businesses. We introduce a novel loan level dataset for 2 million UK SMEs (~5 billion data points) to document a few important facts during Covid-19: (1) The...