Credit spreads on household and business loans move in lockstep and spike in every recession. We propose a theory as to why banks tighten their lending standards following a drop in market sentiment. The key feature is a procyclical shadow banking sector that shifts risk from traditional banks...

This paper provides robust evidence for the non-linear effects of mortgage spread shocks during recessions and expansions in the United States. Estimating a smooth-transition VAR model, we show that mortgage spread shocks hitting in recessionary regimes create significantly deeper and more...

In this paper, we investigate the dynamic relationship between financial market volatility, macroeconomic fundamentals and investor sentiment, employing a two-factor model to decompose volatility into a persistent long-run component and a transitory short-run component. Using a structural VAR...

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 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...

We explore the role of ‘dollar shortage' shocks and central bank swap lines in a two-country New Keynesian model with financial frictions. Domestic banks issue both domestic and foreign currency debt and lend in domestic currency. Foreign currency-specific funding shocks, which are amplified...

It is widely perceived that credit supply conditions faced by UK consumers, particularly in the mortgage market, have been liberalised since the late 1970s, with implications for the housing market and consumer spending. This paper examines quarterly microdata from the Survey of Mortgage Lenders...

We identify a 'risk news' shock in a vector autoregression (VAR), modifying Barsky and Sims's procedure, while incorporating sign restrictions to simultaneously identify monetary policy, technology and demand shocks. The VAR-identifed risk news shock is estimated to account for around 2%-12% of...

Are low interest rates more likely to incentivise greater bank risk-taking? This is the question we seek to answer. Using a model in which banks raise funds from depositors to create an investment portfolio which can differ in its risk and return, we suggest so. In particular, we show that...

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...