We utilise questions concerning individual ‘debt literacy’ incorporated into market research data on households’ unsecured debt positions to examine the association between consumer credit and individual financial literacy. We examine the relationship between individual responses to debt...

Recent evidence suggests that agents’ expectations may have played a role in several cycli¬cal episodes such as the U.S. "new economy" boom in the late 1990s, the real estate boom in Japan in the 1980s and the real estate boom in the U.S. which ended in 2008. One chal¬lenge in the...

We document that, at business cycle frequencies, fluctuations in nominal variables, such as aggregate price levels and nominal interest rates, are substantially more synchronized across countries than fluctuations in real output. To the extent that domestic nominal variables are largely...

This paper provides a characterisation of U.S. monetary policy within a generalized Tay¬lor rule framework that accommodates uncertainties about the duration of policy regimes and the speciÞcation of the rule, in addition to the standard parameter and stochastic un¬certainties inherent in...

Using individual-level panel data, this paper examines the relationship between problem debt and psychological health. Individuals exhibiting problem debt, by either subjective or objective measures, also exhibit much worse psychological health, by either subjective or objective measures....

I argue that the offsetting effect of public pension contributions on household retirement saving depends on how closely the public pension programme imitates a private retirement saving plan (i.e. the ‘actuarial’ content of the public pension programme) – the closer the design of the...

This paper uses a panel of 24184 UK firms over the period 1993-2003 to study the extent to which the sensitivity of investment to cash flow differs at firms facing different levels of internal and external financial constraints. Our results suggest that when the sample is split on the basis of...

This paper develops a rich decision theoretic dynamic ¯rm model that analyzes productivity and interest rate shocks. The model is used to analyze the cyclical dynamics of fixed and inventory investment and in particular asks whether constraints to the flow of funds can generate the frequently...

With ageing populations, OECD governments are searching for policies to increase retirement incomes. The UK government has introduced a series of policies, including the introduction of Personal Pensions from April 1988, of Stakeholder Pensions from April 2001, and the planned introduction of a...

The importance of truncated distributions for bias in estimation of regression coefficients has been well understood by econometricians, but the relevance of truncation when estimating policy reaction functions has not been fully appreciated. Due to the emergence of low interest rates and the...