The equitable rate of interest represents a benchmark to evaluate the cross-sectional effects of monetary policy. I define it as the real rate of interest that minimizes the welfare losses associated to cross-sectional heterogeneity, under flexible prices. In a large class of models, it can be...

We study whether firms' expectations react to the Bank of England's monetary policy announcements by comparing the responses to the Decision Maker Panel (DMP) survey filed immediately before and after a Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) meeting. On the one hand, we find that firms' expectations...

Since the Great Recession policy rates have been extremely low, but neither absolutely constant, nor exactly set to zero. We thus augment a standard zero lower bound model to study the effects of a stochastic lower bound (SLB) on policy rates. We find that a less predictable SLB helps keep...

In this paper we explore the link between monetary policy and market power. We start by establishing several facts on market power in UK markets using micro data. First, while no clear trend emerges for market concentration, market power measured by markups estimated at the firm level have...

In this paper, we use an estimated DSGE model of the UK economy to investigate perceptions of the effectiveness of monetary policy since the onset of the 2007–08 financial crisis in a number of measures of deflation probability — the Survey of Economic Forecasts, financial-market option...

We develop a model that can explain the evolution of trend inflation in the United States in the three decades before the Great Recession as a function of the reduction in uncertainty about the monetary policy maker's behaviour. The model features ambiguity-averse agents and ambiguity regarding...

This paper investigates the real-time forecast performance of the Bank of England's main DSGE model, COMPASS, before, during and after the financial crisis with reference to statistical and judgemental benchmarks. A general finding is that COMPASS's relative forecast performance improves as the...

We estimate a time varying parameter structural macroeconomic model of the UK economy, using a Bayesian local likelihood methodology. This enables us to estimate a large open-economy DSGE model over a sample that comprises several different regimes and an incomplete set of data. Our estimation...

We study whether firms' expectations react to the Bank of England's monetary policy announcements by comparing the responses to the Decision Maker Panel (DMP) survey filed immediately before and after a Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) meeting. On the one hand, we find that firms' expectations...