Corporate debt levels in the United Kingdom are currently at an historically high level in relation to the market value of corporate capital. Empirical evidence discussed in this article suggests that this is unlikely to be an equilibrium position and that companies will continue to act so as to...

​In partnership with academics from Nottingham and Stanford Universities, the Bank has launched a new monthly survey of senior executives in British businesses - the Decision Maker Panel (DMP) - that will enable better measurement of the impact of uncertainty on business decisions.DMP members...

The UK's decision to leave the EU in the 2016 referendum created substantial uncertainty for UK businesses. The nature of this uncertainty is different from that of a typical uncertainty shock because of its length, breadth and political complexity. Consequently, a new firm-level survey, the...

A financial conditions index (FCI) is designed to summarise the state of financial markets. Two are constructed with UK data. The first is the first principal component of a set of financial indicators. The second comes from a new approach taking information from a large set of macroeconomic...

In many larger advanced economies labour productivity growth slowed sharply and remained subdued for years after the credit crisis of 2007/08. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the United Kingdom. We examine the dynamics of productivity among British businesses that lie behind this...

A key feature of the financial crisis was that the cost to banks of unsecured term funding rose sharply relative to expected policy rates and did so heterogeneously across banks. This paper examines the pass-through of bank funding costs to retail loan and deposit rates in the United Kingdom,...

Labour productivity stagnated in the UK in the years between the financial crisis and the emergence of Covid-19. At the same time labour supply and employment grew strongly, driven primarily by net inward migration. While labour productivity should be independent of labour supplied in the long...

This article presents the results of an investigation into the extent of loan forbearance in the SME sector and its implications for productivity and financial system resilience. Around 6% of SME borrowers were estimated to be in receipt of some form of loan forbearance in March 2013. This...