We consider the economic record of the 1997–2010 Labour government in the UK. Following a brief review of the government’s inheritance from its predecessor, we review the assessments made in the other papers in this issue of the <italic>Oxford Review of Economic Policy</italic>: the change in the...

The monetary policy reaction function of the Bank of England is estimated by the standard GMM approach and the ex-ante forecast method developed by Goodhart (2005), with particular attention to the horizons for inflation and output at which each approach gives the best fit. The horizons for the...

The financial crisis and the role played within it by fluctuations in house prices has reopened the debate about whether monetary policy should respond to asset prices. This paper investigates how the central banks of the euro area, the UK and the US considered, understood and responded to the...

When Bank of England (and the Federal Reserve Board) introduced their quantitative easing (QE) operations they emphasised the effects on money and credit, but much of their empirical research on the effects of QE focuses on long-term interest rates. We use a flow of funds matrix with an...

The monetary policy reaction function of the Bank of England is estimated by the standard GMM approach and the ex-ante forecast method developed by Goodhart (2005), with particular attention to the horizons for inflation and output at which each approach gives the best fit. The horizons for the...

The financial crisis, on the one hand, and the recourse to ‘unconventional’ monetary policy, on the other, have given a sharp jolt to perceptions of the role and status of central banks. In this paper we start with a brief ‘contrarian’ history of central banks since the second world war,...

Data on the net sources of finance for France are used to argue that the French financial system was never an economie d'endettement, and to question the idea that France has converged on the Anglo-Saxon model under the impact of financial innovation and deregulation since the early 1980s. These...

New data on the sources of finance for the nonfinancial corporate sector show that Italian firms as a whole use more equity finance than their Anglo-Saxon counterparts, and smaller Italian firms use equity more intensively than larger firms. Both findings can be understood in terms of the...