As part of its response to the global banking crisis and a sharp downturn in domestic economic prospects, the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) began a programme of large-scale asset purchases (commonly referred to as quantitative easing or QE) in March 2009, with the aim of...

We propose a shadow rate that measures the overall stance of monetary policy when the lower bound is not necessarily binding. Using daily yield curve data we estimate shadow rates for the US, Sweden, the euro area and the UK, and document that they fall (rise) as monetary policy becomes more...

It is well known that quantitative credit restrictions, rather than Bagehot-style ‘free lending' constituted the standard response to financial crises in the early days of central banking. But why did central banks in the past frequently restrict the supply of loans during financial crises? In...

This paper constructs a new series of monetary policy surprises for the United Kingdom and estimates their effects on macroeconomic and financial variables, employing a high-frequency identification procedure. First, using local projections methods, we find that monetary policy has persistent...

We study the macroeconomic consequences of issuing central bank digital currency (CBDC) — a universally accessible and interest-bearing central bank liability, implemented via distributed ledgers, that competes with bank deposits as medium of exchange. In a DSGE model calibrated to match the...

We study the macroprudential roles of bank capital regulation and monetary policy in a borrowing cost channel model with endogenous financial frictions, driven by credit risk, bank losses and bank capital costs. These frictions induce financial accelerator mechanisms and motivate the examination...

Money market volatility may disrupt the transmission mechanism of monetary policy as well as increase uncertainty for market participants. This paper assesses the impact of reforms to the Bank of England's operating framework over the last two decades. These reforms have been successful in...

This paper sets out three models of central bank digital currency (CBDC) that differ in the sectors that have access to CBDC. It studies sectoral balance sheet dynamics at the point of an initial CBDC introduction, and of an attempted large-scale run out of bank deposits into CBDC. We find that...

In the past decade or so, a number of central banks have purchased assets financed by the creation of central bank reserves as a tool for loosening monetary policy – a policy often known as ‘quantitative easing' or ‘QE'. The first half of the paper reviews the international evidence on the...

In periods of stress, acute liquidity squeeze can manifest in the riskier segments of the credit market, even amid a surplus of aggregate liquidity. In such scenarios, central bank interventions that directly lower the risky interest rate can be more effective than reductions in the risk-free...