In aggregate models, costs that penalise changes in investment - investment adjustment costs - have been introduced to help account for a variety of business cycle and asset market phenomena. In this paper, we evaluate empirical evidence for these types of costs using US and UK industry data. We...

Why is inflation so much lower and at the same time more stable in developed economies in the 1990s, compared with the 1970s? This paper suggests that the United Kingdom, United States and other countries may have escaped from a volatile inflation equilibrium. Our argument builds on the story...

Evidence abounds on the propagation of financial stresses originating in the US mortgage market to banking systems worldwide through international funding markets. But the transmission of this external funding shock to the real economy via bank lending is surprisingly under-examined, given the...

Evidence abounds on the propagation of financial stresses originating in the US mortgage market to banking systems worldwide through international funding markets. But the transmission of this external funding shock to the real economy via bank lending is surprisingly underexamined, given the...

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...

We investigate the macroeconomic effects of political risk in an information-rich SVAR. Using an external instrument based on an index of US partisan conflict for identification, we find that reduced political risk has expansionary impact: it is immediately priced into stock prices; increases...

This paper brings together modern empirical techniques, a sign-restricted structural vector autoregression, with contemporary high frequency data to answer an old question – what role did macroeconomic policy play in Britain’s high unemployment and deflation in the years 1919 to 1938. Its...

In this paper, we investigate the information content of prices in relatively sticky-price sectors versus relatively flexible-price sectors. We first present some empirical evidence that relatively flexible prices react more to deviations of output from trend than stickier prices and that sticky...

Using data on government bond yields in Germany and the United States, we show that overseas unspanned factors — constructed from the components of overseas yields that are uncorrelated with domestic yields — have significant explanatory power for subsequent domestic bond returns. This...

We use transactional data from the USD and EUR segments of the plain vanilla interest rate swap market to assess the impact of the Dodd-Frank mandate that US persons must trade certain swap contracts on Swap Execution Facilities (SEFs). We find that, as a result of SEF trading, activity...