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 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...

On implementation, IFRS 9 increases credit loss (impairment) charges and reduces after-tax profits of banks. This makes retained earnings and hence capital resources lower than what they would be under IAS 39. To maintain their capital ratios under IFRS 9, banks could elect to hold higher levels...

We model the evolution of stylised bank loan portfolios to assess the impact of IFRS 9 and US GAAP expected loss model (ECL) on the cyclicality of loan write-off losses, loan loss provisions (LLPs) and capital ratios of banks, relative to the incurred loss model of IAS 39. We focus on the...

We use new firm-level estimates of the cost of capital and uncertainty to study the drivers of UK business investment in a neoclassical investment model. We construct firm-specific measures of the cost of capital and uncertainty and use new UK survey data to estimate firm-specific investment...

Using a structural vector autoregression, we document that a contractionary monetary policy shock triggers a decline in durable and non-durable outputs as well as a contraction in bank equity and a rise in the excess bond premium. The latter points to an important transmission channel of...

This paper shows that lending relationships insulate corporate investment from fluctuations in collateral values. We construct a novel database covering the banking relationships of private and public UK firms and their individual directors. The sensitivity of corporate investment to changes in...

Firms with high pre-crisis cash holdings invested significantly more than their cash-poor rivals during the global financial crisis and especially so during the recovery phase. This resulted in a persistent and growing investment gap between cash-rich and cash-poor firms. Cash especially...

Does corporate debt overhang affect investment over the medium term? To uncover this association, I measure debt overhang with a concept of debt accumulation or debt boom, and combine leverage with liquid assets to capture financial constraints. Using a large US firm-level panel over 1985...

We find that capital renting makes up one fifth of US capital expenditures, and it increases during downturns. Further, we present cross-country evidence that output losses after financial crises are smaller where renting is more prevalent. To understand these findings, we build a general...