In the past decade or so, a number of central banks have purchased assets financed by the creation of central bank reserves as a tool for loosening monetary policy – a policy often known as ‘quantitative easing' or ‘QE'. The first half of the paper reviews the international evidence on the...

The global financial crisis has been the prompt for a complete rethink of financial stability and policies for achieving it. Over the course of the better part of a decade, a deep and wide-ranging international regulatory reform effort has been under way, as great as any since the Great...

Is human or artificial intelligence more conducive to a stable financial system? To answer this question, we compare human and artificial intelligence with respect to several facets of their decision-making behaviour. On that basis, we characterise possibilities and challenges in designing...

In this paper we explore both theoretical and empirical evidence on communication with the general public. The model provides guidance for policymakers by highlighting some potentially important risks in communicating simply with a broader audience. In particular, in a model where trust and...

In this paper, we use micro-data from the UK Labour Force Survey to estimate unconditional and conditional pay gaps for gender and ethnicity groups since the mid-90s. Both types of gender pay gap have decreased over the sample, but remain in double digits. For ethnicity, the unconditional pay...

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...

Macroeconomic modelling has been under intense scrutiny since the Great Financial Crisis, when serious shortcomings were exposed in the methodology used to understand the economy as a whole. Criticism has been leveled at the assumptions employed in the dominant models, particularly that economic...

Concerns were raised about the distributional impact of the loosening in UK monetary policy following the financial crisis. We assess the impact of this loosening on well-being using household-level data and estimated utility functions. The welfare benefits are found to have been positive, in...