Over the past four decades, real interest rates have risen then fallen across the industrialised world. Over the same period, nominal investment rates fell, while house prices and household debt ratios rose. I explain these four trends with a fifth — the widespread fall in the relative price...

This paper explores the influence of some key institutional features of the labour market on aggregate fluctuations. It uses a dynamic, stochastic, general equilibrium model characterised by search and matching frictions in the labour market and nominal rigidities in the goods market. It finds...

We extend the standard textbook search and matching model by introducing deep habits in consumption. The cyclical fluctuations of vacancies and unemployment in our model can replicate those observed in the US data, with labour market tightness being 20 times more volatile than consumption....

This paper develops a DSGE model in which banks use short-term deposits to provide firms with long-term credit. The demand for long-term credit arises because firms borrow in order to finance their capital stock which they only adjust at infrequent intervals. We show within a real business cycle...

Banking crises have severe short and long‑term consequences. We develop a general equilibrium model with financial frictions and endogenous growth in which macroprudential policy supports economic activity and productivity growth by strengthening bank’s resilience to adverse financial...

This paper analyses the conduct of monetary policy in an environment in which cyclical swings in risk appetite affect households' propensity to save. It uses a New Keynesian model featuring external habit formation to show that taking note of precautionary saving motives justifies an...

This paper presents a range of unobserved components models to study productivity dynamics in the United Kingdom. We introduce a set of univariate and bivariate models that allow for shocks between the trend and the cycle to be correlated, and use Bayesian sampling techniques to estimate the...