Macroeconomic performance in the United Kingdom has been disappointing in recent years: for most of the post-crisis period, GDP growth has been unexpectedly weak, and inflation unexpectedly strong. That unexpected weakness in GDP reflects a combination of weaker growth in the United Kingdom’s...

This article uses household-level survey data on income and employment to compare labour market dynamics across a range of advanced economies, including Australia. The analysis focuses on how changes in employment status are distributed within countries and how those distributional patterns vary...

Employment has fallen during this recession but by much less than the fall in output. This article examines how the behaviour of the labour market compares with previous recessions. A number of factors, including greater flexibility in real wages, may have helped to mitigate the fall in...

The unconventional monetary policy measures adopted by the major central banks in the period since 2008 are discussed in this paper. We highlight some important differences between quantitative easing and conventional monetary policy and then evaluate the mechanisms through which quantitative...

Over the past year the recovery in the UK economy appears to have slowed. That weakness in UK demand has been driven by falling consumption, reflecting the challenging environment facing households. This article examines the factors affecting households’ budgets and spending decisions using...

We estimate the effect of changes in microprudential regulatory capital requirements on bank capital ratios and bank lending. We do so by running panel regressions using a rich new data set, exploiting variation in individual bank capital requirements in the United Kingdom from 1990-2011. There...

Money is essential to the workings of a modern economy, but its nature has varied substantially over time. This article provides an introduction to what money is today. Money today is a type of IOU, but one that is special because everyone in the economy trusts that it will be accepted by other...

The Bank of England and HM Treasury launched the Funding for Lending Scheme (FLS) in order to encourage lending to households and companies. The FLS offers funding to banks and building societies for an extended period. And it encourages them to supply more credit by making more and cheaper...

This article explains how the majority of money in the modern economy is created by commercial banks making loans. Money creation in practice differs from some popular misconceptions — banks do not act simply as intermediaries, lending out deposits that savers place with them, and nor do they...