Cash is king as corporate revenues plummet during the COVID-19 lockdown. Evidence from the global financial crisis shows that firms with high pre-crisis cash holdings can invest during a crisis while their cash-poor rivals have to divest. This gives cash-rich firms a competitive advantage during...

The local network structure of international trade relations offers a new dimension for understanding a country's competitive position vis-á-vis its trade partners and competitors, supporting economic policy analysis. We introduce two network measures that can be used to analyse comparative...

Universal function approximators, such as artificial neural networks, can learn a large variety of target functions arbitrarily well given sufficient training data. This flexibility comes at the cost of the ability to perform parametric inference. We address this gap by proposing a generic...

Cash holdings at the onset of a financial crisis are a key determinant of investment by SMEs not only during the crisis but also during the recovery period. Cash-rich SMEs could maintain their capital stock during the global financial crisis, while cash-poor rivals reduced theirs. This gave...

We forecast CPI inflation in the United Kingdom up to one year ahead using a large set of monthly disaggregated CPI item series combined with a wide set of forecasting tools, including dimensionality reduction techniques, shrinkage methods and non-linear machine learning models. We find that...

ABSTRACT The financial crisis has demonstrated the need for a set of macroprudential policy tools that can be used to mitigate systemic risk. Focusing on the UK, our paper reviews the performance of the Basel III credit‐to‐GDP gap that, alongside judgement, is to be used as a reference guide...

We examine the role of macroeconomic fluctuations, asset market liquidity, and network structure in determining contagion and aggregate losses in a financial system. Systemic instability is explored in a financial network comprising three distinct, but interconnected, sets of agents – domestic...