In many larger advanced economies labour productivity growth slowed sharply and remained subdued for years after the credit crisis of 2007/08. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the United Kingdom. We examine the dynamics of productivity among British businesses that lie behind this...

This paper examines the role of defined benefit company pensions in amplifying the effect of common shocks to companies' stock market valuations. It identifies and evaluates the significance of two channels of amplification: cross-holdings of equities in pension schemes, and leverage induced by...

The UK's decision to leave the EU in the 2016 referendum created substantial uncertainty for UK businesses. The nature of this uncertainty is different from that of a typical uncertainty shock because of its length, breadth and political complexity. Consequently, a new firm-level survey, the...

A financial conditions index (FCI) is designed to summarise the state of financial markets. Two are constructed with UK data. The first is the first principal component of a set of financial indicators. The second comes from a new approach taking information from a large set of macroeconomic...

A key feature of the financial crisis was that the cost to banks of unsecured term funding rose sharply relative to expected policy rates and did so heterogeneously across banks. This paper examines the pass-through of bank funding costs to retail loan and deposit rates in the United Kingdom,...