Long-horizon interest rates in the major international bond markets fell sharply during 2004 and 2005, at the same time as US policy rates were rising; a phenomenon famously described as a 'conundrum' by Alan Greenspan the Federal Reserve Chairman. But it was arguably the decline in...

This paper combines a structural vector autoregression (SVAR) with a no-arbitrage approach to build a multifactor affine term structure model (ATSM). The resulting no-arbitrage structural vector autoregressive (NA-SVAR) model implies that expected excess returns are driven by the structural...

This paper reviews the main instruments and associated yield curves that can be used to measure financial market participants' expectations of future UK monetary policy rates. We attempt to evaluate these instruments and curves in terms of their ability to forecast policy rates over the period...

This paper analyses the nominal and real interest rate term structures in the United Kingdom over the fifteen-year period that the UK monetary authorities have pursued an explicit inflation target, using a four-factor essentially affine term structure model. The model imposes no-arbitrage...

This paper contains the first detailed empirical examination of the information content of the Bank of England Credit Conditions Survey (CCS). The CCS asks a wide selection of questions of UK lenders relating to all aspects of bank credit provision. We examine the association between the survey...

Using vector autoregressive models with either constant or time-varying parameters and stochastic volatility for the United States, we find that a contractionary monetary policy shock has a persistent negative impact on the asset growth of commercial banks, but increases the asset growth of...

This paper investigates the role of credit demand and supply shocks in driving the weakness in UK banks’ lending and economic activity during both the recent financial crisis and the various UK financial crises since 1966. It uses a structural vector autoregression analysis to identify...

This paper examines the macroeconomic impact of the first round of quantitative easing (QE) by the Bank of England which started in March 2009. Although Bank Rate, the UK policy rate, was reduced to ½%, effectively its lower bound, the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee felt that additional...

This paper uses a simple money demand and supply framework to estimate the impact of quantitative easing (QE) on asset prices and nominal spending. We use standard money accounting to try to establish the impact of asset purchases on broad money holdings. We show that the initial impact of £200...

This paper extends a popular no-arbitrage affine term structure model to model jointly bond markets and exchange rates across the United Kingdom, United States and euro area. Using a monthly data set of forward rates from 1992, we first demonstrate that two global factors account for a...