In this joint Bank of England and Behavioural Insights Team study, we test the effectiveness of different approaches to central bank communications. Using an online experiment with a representative sample of the UK population, we measure how changes to the Bank of England's summaries of the...

The banking reforms that followed the financial crisis of 2007–08 led to an increase in UK banking regulation from almost 400,000 to over 720,000 words, and to concerns about their complexity. We define complexity in terms of the difficulty of processing linguistic units, both in isolation and...

We introduce a novel data set to analyze the impact of the Covid-19 crisis on SME cash flows. The crisis led to a sharp drop in economic activity in the UK, which hit SMEs harder than larger businesses. The data set comprises monthly information on all 2 million SMEs that have current accounts...

We use daily transactional ledger data from the Bank of England's Archive to test whether and to what extent the Bank of England during the mid-nineteenth century adhered to Walter Bagehot's rule that a central bank in a financial crisis should lend cash freely at a penalty rate in exchange for...

Our paper analyses confidential letters sent from the Bank of England's Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) to banks and building societies it supervises. These letters are a ‘report card' written to firms annually, and are arguably the most important, regularly recurring written...

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 examines the important but not often discussed issue of accounting in central banks. It highlights the distinguishing factors that make the financial statements of central banks unique relative to those produced by other bodies. We begin by explaining why central banks produce...

Asset quality is an essential part of sound banking. However, asset quality is difficult for banking regulators and investors to assess in the absence of a common, cross-border scheme to classify assets. Currently no standard is applied universally to classify loans, the most sizable asset on...

Peer-to-peer (P2P) lending — direct lending between lenders and borrowers online outside traditional financial intermediaries like banks — first emerged in the United Kingdom and the world with the launch of Zopa in 2005. Our paper provides a quantitative analysis of nearly 14 million loan...

Peer-to-peer (P2P) lending — direct lending between lenders and borrowers online outside traditional financial intermediaries like banks — first emerged in the United Kingdom and the world with the launch of Zopa in 2005. Our paper provides a quantitative analysis of nearly 14 million loan...