The Bank of England operates the United Kingdom's Real-Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) infrastructure for the settlement of the main electronic sterling payment systems. This infrastructure plays a vital role in the safe functioning of the UK financial system, and therefore in maintaining financial...

This is the first in a new series of annual reports, designed to throw light on the operation of the Bank's published framework for implementing monetary policy and providing liquidity to the banking system, known as the Sterling Monetary Framework (SMF). As recommended by Bill Winters' review...

The Bank stands ready to lend to its counterparties against eligible collateral, which includes a wide range of securities and portfolios of loans that can be adequately risk-managed through a combination of prudent eligibility criteria, valuations and haircuts. When accepting portfolios of...

Much is published about the Bank of England's policy functions and its financial operations. But less is typically known about the Bank's role as a bank in the more traditional sense, offering accounts and banking services to its customers. The three main customer groups to which the Bank...

We trace the impact of the European Central Bank (ECB) asset purchase programme (APP) on the yield curve. Exploiting granular information on sectoral asset holdings and ECB asset purchases, we construct a novel measure of the "free-float of duration risk" borne by pricesensitive investors. We...

Policy announcements by central banks affect financial markets, but their effect on consumer beliefs is limited. This paper studies the implications of using different communication channels: established media outlets versus social media. Information on the news sources comes from our original...

This paper investigates whether the funding behaviour of euro area debt management offices (DMOs) changed with the start of the ECB's Public Sector Purchase Programme (PSPP). Our results show that (i) lower yield levels and (ii) PSPP purchases supported higher maturities at issuance. The former...

In this paper we provide empirical measures of central bank credibility and augment these with historical narratives from eleven countries. To the extent we are able to apply reliable institutional information we can also indirectly assess their role in influencing the credibility of the...

This paper examines the historical evolution of central bank credibility using both historical narrative and empirics for a group of 16 countries, both advanced and emerging. It shows how the evolution of credibility has gone through a pendulum where credibility was high under the classical gold...