This paper is about the effectiveness of qualitative easing, a form of unconventional monetary policy that changes the risk composition of the central bank balance sheet with the goal of stabilizing economic activity. We construct a general equilibrium model where agents have rational...

Long-term real interest rates across the world have fallen by about 450 basis points over the past 30 years. The co-movement in rates across both advanced and emerging economies suggests a common driver: the global neutral real rate may have fallen. In this paper we attempt to identify which...

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...

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...

The decision to extract home equity is examined using household-level data for the United Kingdom, 1993 to 2003. At its peak during the period, around one in ten homeowners withdrew equity per year. The paper finds that the equity withdrawal decision conforms to predictions from the standard...

It is well‑known that production functions are potentially misspecified when revenue is used as a proxy for output. In this paper, I formalise and strengthen this common knowledge by showing that neither the production function nor Hicks‑neutral productivity can be identified when revenue is...

Recent empirical evidence based on microdata panels indicates the importance of banks' balance sheets for the monetary transmission mechanism. This paper builds a dynamic general equilibrium model to analyse the macroeconomic consequences of changes in the cost of bank capital, and thus the cost...

We use a DSGE model with financial frictions, leverage limits on banks, loan to value (LTV) limits and debt‑service ratio (DSR) limits on mortgage borrowing to examine: i) the effects of different macroprudential policies on key macro aggregates; ii) their interaction with each other and with...

This paper provides novel empirical evidence showing that foreign financial developments are a powerful predictor of domestic banking crises. Using a new data set for 38 advanced and emerging economies over 1970–2011, we show that credit growth in the rest of the world has a large positive...