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...

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...

Conventional wisdom has it that Tobin's Q cannot help explain aggregate investment. This is puzzling, as recent evidence suggests the closely related user cost approach can do so. We do not attempt to explain this puzzle. Instead, we take an entirely different approach, not using the first-order...

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...

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...

This paper studies the impact of credit sector reforms in a general equilibrium framework where heterogeneous firms choose their optimal investment and how to finance it. Besides retained earnings and bank loans, I focus on the crucial role played by alternative sources of funding, including...

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...

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...

In the wake of the financial crisis output fell dramatically while inflation remained above its target and productivity collapsed relative to its previous trend. The fall in productivity relative to trend was particularly pronounced within the service sector, and then most particularly in...

We construct a new scenario analysis model for the United Kingdom using ONS data from 1987 to the present. The model links decisions about real variables to credit creation in the financial sector and decisions about asset allocation among investors for a wide array of financial assets. We...