House prices are a constant source of fascination and discussion in the UK. In the short term, prices move closely with market conditions. Over the longer term, meanwhile, attention often focuses on simple ratios of house prices to earnings. Despite this, relatively little work has been done to...

In the absence of more timely or accurate information, survey indicators of economic activity are closely watched by financial markets and policymakers alike. These include the Purchasing Managers' Indices (PMIs), which are widely regarded as important indicators of economic activity. PMIs are...

The past two years have seen the worst post-war global recession on record, coupled with a dramatic dislocation in financial markets that is unprecedented. While governments around the world have stepped in to shore up their banking sectors, and central banks have cut interest rates to record...

We provide a new perspective on disagreement in inflation expectations by examining the full probability distributions of UK consumer inflation forecasts based on an adaptive bootstrap multimodality test. Furthermore, we compare the inflation forecasts of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy...

Inflation is a key economic indicator that affects all economic agents. But the mechanisms by which price data are captured and aggregated are less uniform than might be expected, and there are a number of practical issues that can affect measured inflation rates. Focusing on UK data, this...

With the global financial sector still recovering from the worst financial crisis in living memory, there is plenty of scope for new competitors to enter the market, or for smaller operations to seize market share. In the U.K., some of these competitors are likely to be supermarkets, which...

It is likely to be several decades before data on government assets, off-balance sheet and contingent liabilities are consistently available across a wide range of countries. In the absence of data, GDP is a readily available scaling factor, but official sector agencies such as the IMF and...

There are many different gauges of credit risk that investors can use to inform their decisions. Credit rating agencies have produced measures of credit risk for many decades, but financial markets also offer a guide to these risks. The authors examine the behavior of ratings relative to market...

Conventional techniques for estimating the elasticity of substitution between capital and labour in the production process typically focus on factor-demand equations. An implicit assumption in this approach is normally that the markup is stationary. But that may not be true. This paper considers...

This paper uses regular business surveys of UK activity to gauge price flexibility. These imply an average price duration of two to three quarters, and this is stable across sectors. Strict time-dependent pricing does not hold over the long run, and there is evidence that firms introduce some...