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...

Macroeconomic modelling has been under intense scrutiny since the Great Financial Crisis, when serious shortcomings were exposed in the methodology used to understand the economy as a whole. Criticism has been leveled at the assumptions employed in the dominant models, particularly that economic...

We introduce machine learning in the context of central banking and policy analyses. Our aim is to give an overview broad enough to allow the reader to place machine learning within the wider range of statistical modelling and computational analyses, and provide an idea of its scope and...

We estimate a New Keynesian model with matching frictions and nominal wage rigidities on UK data. We are able to identify important structural parameters, recover the unobservable shocks that have affected the UK economy since 1971 and study the transmission mechanism. With matching frictions,...

This paper re-examines the evolution of the US monetary transmission mechanism using an empirical framework that incorporates substantially more information than the standard tri-variate VAR model used in most previous studies. In particular, we employ an extended version of a factor-augmented...

This paper carries out a systematic investigation into the possibility of structural shifts in the UK economy using a Markov-switching dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model. We find strong evidence for shifts in the structural parameters of several equations of the DSGE model. In...

This paper develops a DSGE model which explains variation in the nominal and real term structure along with inflation surveys and four macro variables in the UK economy. The model is estimated based on a third-order approximation to allow for time-varying term premia. We find a fall in nominal...

This paper analyses the conduct of monetary policy in an environment where households' desire to amass precautionary savings is influenced by fluctuations in the volatilities of disturbances that hit the economy. It uses a simple New Keynesian model with external habit formation that is...

A large empirical literature has examined the transmission mechanism of structural shocks in great detail. The possible role played by changes in the volatility of shocks has largely been overlooked in vector autoregression based applications. This paper proposes an extended vector...

Using publicly available data for a group of 20 OECD countries, we find that the cyclical volatility of the unemployment rate exhibits substantial cross-country and time variation. We then investigate empirically whether labour market institutions can account for this observed heterogeneity and...