Studies of the Bank of England’s quantitative easing (QE) policy have tended to focus on its impact on financial markets and the broader macroeconomy. Less attention has been given to the effect on banks’ balance sheets and bank lending. In this paper we use a new non-publicly available...

We examine how the Bank of England’s quantitative easing (QE) policy during the global financial crisis affected the investment behaviour of insurance companies and pension funds and whether their behaviour was consistent with the operation of the so-called 'portfolio balance channel' that has...