In many areas of economics there is a growing interest in how expertise and preferences drive individual and group decision making under uncertainty. Increasingly, we wish to estimate such models to quantify which of these drive decision making. In this paper we propose a new channel through...

Using voting data from the Bank of England, we show that different individual assessments of the economy strongly influence votes after controlling for individual policy preferences. We estimate that internal members form more precise assessments than externals and are also more hawkish, though...

Using Bank of England voting data, we show empirically that members’ votes are driven by heterogeneous individual assessments of the economy as well as their individual policy preferences. Estimates indicate that internal committee members form more precise assessments than externals and are...

Using German microdata and a quasi-natural experiment, we provide evidence on how households respond to an increase in uncertainty. We find that household saving increases significantly following the increase in political uncertainty observed in the run-up to the 1998 German general election. We...

In 1997 Chancellor Kohl proposed a major pension reform: he pushed the law through Parliament explaining that the German PAYG system had become unsustainable. One limitation of the new law - one that is crucial for our identification strategy - is that it left the generous pension entitlements...

We test whether quantitative easing (QE) provided a boost to bank lending in the United Kingdom, in addition to the effects on asset prices, demand and inflation focused on in most other studies. Using a data set available to researchers at the Bank, we use two alternative approaches to identify...

Most macroeconomic forecasters underestimated global investment during the late 1990s. One potential reason was that the models they were using were insufficiently disaggregated. In this paper, an empirical model is estimated whose out-of-sample forecasts largely predicted the global investment...

This paper provides new evidence on the effects of scal policy by studying, using household-level data, how households respond to shifts in government spending. Our identi cation strategy allows us to control for time-specific aggregate effects, such as the stance of monetary policy or the...

This paper provides new evidence on the effects of fiscal policy by studying, using household-level data, how households respond to shifts in government spending. Our identification strategy allows us to control for time-specific aggregate effects, such as the stance of monetary policy or the...

We first establish that policymakers on the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee choose lower interest rates with experience. We then reject increasing confidence in private information or learning about the structure of the macroeconomy as explanations for this shift. Instead, a model...