Evidence that cash flow has a significant effect on company investment spending, after controlling for Tobin's average Q, has often been interpreted as suggesting the importance of financing constraints. Recent work on measurement error in the Q model casts doubt on this interpretation. It is...

There is a live debate about the role of house prices in the transmission mechanism of monetary policy. Do house prices merely reflect macroeconomic conditions, or are there important feedback effects from house prices to other economic variables? A general equilibrium model is considered, where...

We describe methods for measuring liquidity provision that can be applied to real-time gross settlement payment systems. Using data from CHAPS, the UK large-value payment system, we find that smaller banks tend to provide more liquidity than larger banks, relative to their payment flows. We use...

When workers are exposed to human capital depreciation during periods of unemployment, hiring affects the unemployment pool’s composition in terms of skills, and hence the economy’s production potential. Introducing human capital depreciation during unemployment into an otherwise standard...

We use data on UK banks’ minimum capital requirements to study the interaction of monetary policy and capital requirement regulation. UK banks were subject to both time-varying capital requirements and changes in interest rate policy. Tightening of either capital requirements or monetary...

We examine how the Bank of England’s quantitative easing (QE) policy during the global financial crisis affected the investment behaviour of insurance companies and pension funds and whether their behaviour was consistent with the operation of the so-called 'portfolio balance channel' that has...

We examine the extent to which uncertainty with regard to macroeconomic policies in advanced countries spills over to emerging market economies (EMEs) via gross portfolio bond and equity flows. We find that the impact of fluctuations in policy uncertainty on portfolio equity flows differs...

We test whether quantitative easing (QE) provided a boost to bank lending in the United Kingdom, in addition to the effects on asset prices, demand and inflation focused on in most other studies. Using a data set available to researchers at the Bank, we use two alternative approaches to identify...

This paper proposes a method for detecting the sources of misspecification in a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model based on testing, in a data-rich environment, the exogeneity of the variables of the DSGE with respect to some auxiliary variables. Finding evidence of...

This paper documents futures innovation on LIFFE by empirically analyzing the individual growth profiles of its futures contracts and the factors that determine contract success or failure. The paper documents considerable heterogeneity across contracts, and finds that contract success can not...