This paper looks at the voting patterns of internal and external members of the MPC to investigate how far there are differences between insiders and outsiders. We make three contributions. First, we assess the extent to which the Bank of England internally generated forecasts explain the MPC...

The dynamics of the US economy are modelled using a time-varying structural vector autoregression that incorporates information from the yield curve. We find important changes in the dynamics of macroeconomic variables such as inflation and the federal funds rate. In addition our results suggest...

Most analyses of the U.S. Great Moderation have been based on VAR methods, and have consistently pointed toward good luck as the main explanation for the greater macroeconomic stability of recent years. Using data generated by a New-Keynesian model in which the only source of change is the move...

This paper uses mortgage data to construct a measure of terms on which households access to external finance, and relates it to consumption at both the aggregate and cohort levels. The Household External Finance (HEF) index is based on the spread paid by risky borrowers in the mortgage market....

Using a dynamic factor model, we uncover four main empirical or international comovements in a long-run panel of real and nominal variables. First, the countribution of world comovements to domestic output growth has decreased over the post-WWII period. The contribution of regional comovements,...

This paper uses a unique data set on more than 600,000 mortgage contracts to estimate a credit supply function which allows for risk-heterogeneity. Non-linearity is modelled using quantile regressions. We propose an instrumental variable approach in which changes in the tax treatment of housing...

This paper investigates empirically whether the level or growth of cheap imports from China has had an impact on UK inflation. We use two methods; the first calculates UK weighted world export price inflation as the sum of the effect of the inflation level in the UK's trading partners and the...

The recent rise in migration to the UK from eight EU Accession countries (the Czech Republic; Estonia; Hungary; Latvia; Lithuania; Poland; Slovakia; and Slovenia - the A8 countries) has generated a good deal of controversy. How many A8 immigrants are there in the UK? Where did they come from and when?...

This paper is a case study of the real world monetary policy data uncertainty problem. The initial and the latest release for growth rates of the distribution, hotels and catering sector are combined with official data on household income and two surveys in a state-space model. Though important...

We evaluate the degree of gradualism and inaction in UK monetary policy over the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) period (1997-2007) at the quarterly and the monthly frequency. After accounting for misspecification in standard Taylor rules, we find little evidence for gradualism. A measure of...