The authors assess empirically the impact on firm performance of a state-subsidised training-loan scheme for small businesses (the Small Firms Training Loan Scheme). To achieve this assessment, a longitudinal sample of firms that received loans from the leading lender under the scheme, Barclays...

In London, the world's foremost financial centre, the week before the outbreak of the First World War saw the breakdown of the markets, culminating with the closure for the first time ever of the London Stock Exchange on Friday 31 July. Outside the Bank of England a long anxious queue waited to...

The Bank of England's tercentenary (July 1994), coming as it does with the future status of the Bank a subject of much discussion, is an apposite moment to offer an overview of the Bank's history as a whole. Obviously there have been several detailed histories of the Bank, but this collection of...

This paper links new firm survival with growth, with a focus on the patterns in firms' growth paths. We theorise a Gambler's Ruin framework by arguing that new rm performance is best modelled as a random walk process, but that survival is nonrandom and depends primarily on the stock of...

Monetary policymakers and long-term investors would benefit greatly from a measure of underlying inflation that uses all relevant information, is available in real time, and forecasts inflation better than traditional underlying inflation measures such as core inflation measures. This paper...