The paper examines the effect of household financial indebtedness on the psychological well-being of mothers, using a large household survey of families with children for Britain. Although some existing studies find a link between debt and depression, they tend to utilise small and often highly...

We describe the trajectory of pension reform in the United Kingdom, which has focussed on keeping the cost of public pension programmes down during a period of steady population ageing whilst attempting to maintain an adequate minimum level of income security for low income households in...

The ‘financial accelerator’ model when applied to households states that shocks to household balance sheets (primarily changes in house prices) amplify fluctuations in consumer spending by tightening or relaxing collateral constraints on borrowing. We construct an alternative model where...

This paper provides a theoretical model of an open economy credit channel including currency mismatch and financial fragility where exporting firms have access to international credit but non-exporting firms do not. It considers the post-crisis outcome which is predicted to be dramatically...

Defining a recessionary event as one which impacts adversely on individuals’ economic well-being, the paper argues that recession is a multi-faceted phenomenon whose meaning differs from person to person as it impacts on their decision-making in real time. It argues that recession is best...

We develop a simple theoretical model to examine the impact of the distribution of wealth on the patterns of trade when capital markets are imperfect. Our model predicts that the dispersion of wealth can be a determinant of comparative advantage for low-income countries with poor financial...

If households face uninsurable idiosyncratic earnings risk, theory predicts that re- distributive tax and transfer systems have both an insurance and a distortionary effect. Exploiting the substantial variation of tax and transfer systems across US states and over time we investigate the...

An output gap measure is suggested based on a multivariate Beveridge-Nelson decomposition of output using a vector-autoregressive model that includes data on actual output and on expected output obtained from surveys. The gap is estimated using an integrated approach to identifying permanent and...

We analytically show that a common across rich/poor individuals Stone-Geary utility function with subsistence consumption in the context of a simple two-asset portfolio-choice model is capable of qualitatively explaining: (i) the higher saving rates of the rich, (ii) the higher fraction of...

This paper analyses how firms’ capital-labour ratio is affected by cash flow, leverage, and collateral, and how this effect differs at firms more and less likely to face financing constraints using a rich UK firm-level data set. It is common in the literature to examine the impact of financial...