Large deficits have opened up on defined benefit pension schemes in the United Kingdom since 2007, and at the same time investment expenditure has been subdued; this is a common phenomenon in other countries too. We use privileged access to a unique new data set from The Pensions Regulator and two...

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...

The Lehman Brothers event in 2008 created a large uncertainty shock that triggered an economic slowdown lasting a decade. The macroeconomic effects are well documented, but the effect on business decisions much less so. In this paper, we explore corporate data to investigate how economic...

We consider several economic uncertainty indicators for the US and UK before and during the Covid-19 pandemic: implied stock market volatility, newspaper-based economic policy uncertainty, twitter chatter about economic uncertainty, subjective uncertainty about future business growth, and...

We use a major new survey of UK firms, the Decision Maker Panel, to assess the impact of the June 2016 Brexit referendum. We identify three key results. First, the UK's decision to leave the EU has generated a large, broad and long-lasting increase in uncertainty. Second, anticipation of Brexit...

This paper reports estimates of an econometric model of the determinants of OFCs' broad money holding and M4 lending to OFCs. This is of interest as it gives information about a component of UK money and credit aggregates, and also because it provides some evidence of the link between financial...

We analyse the impact of Covid-19 on productivity using data from an innovative monthly firm survey panel that asks for quantitative impacts of Covid on inputs and outputs. We find total factor productivity (TFP) fell by up to 5% during 2020–21. The overall impact combined large reductions in...

We use data from a large panel survey of UK firms to analyze the economic drivers of price setting since the start of the Covid pandemic. Inflation responded asymmetrically to movements in demand. This helps to explain why inflation did not fall much during the negative initial pandemic demand...