Intertemporal models of the current account suggest that temporary income shocks are fully reflected in a country's net foreign asset position, so that agents invest abroad any savings generated by a positive income shock. On the other hand, a stylised fact in international economics is that...

This paper extends US evidence on the ability of current dividend yields to predict future equity returns in the G5 countries. By using non-parametric methods, evidence of a similar non- linear structure is found in all the countries analysed. This casts doubt on the linear framework adopted in...

Household indebtedness has grown sharply in the United Kingdom in recent years. This paper proposes a framework for understanding this based on a model in which households are assumed to plan their lifetime spending rationally, allowing for bequests to future generations. The model is set up to...

The unemployment rate is commonly assumed to measure labour availability, but this ignores the fact that potential workers frequently come from outside the current set of labour market participants, the so-called inactive. The UK Longitudinal Labour Force Survey includes information that can be...

It is widely accepted that wage comparisons with other firms play an important part in wage bargaining, but what is less clear is precisely why these comparisons are important. There are two main explanations. First, that fairness considerations mean workers are unwilling to see their wage fall...

This paper revisits the issue of long-horizon equity return predictability for the United Kingdom in the context of the dynamic dividend discount model of Campbell and Shiller. This model attributes predictable variation in equity prices to predictable variation in expected returns. The model is...

In this paper the causes of the rise in US household debt since the early 1970s are considered, using a calibrated partial equilibrium overlapping generations model. The model explains indebtedness in terms of a consumption-income motive, associated with consumption smoothing, and a...

This paper attempts to identify the sources of UK exchange rate and relative consumer price fluctuations between 1973 and 1994. We follow Clarida and Gali (1994) in using the Blanchard and Quah (1989) structural VAR (SVAR) method to identify the effects of three structural shocks within a...

The large-value payment system in the United Kingdom (CHAPS) is highly tiered: a few settlement banks make payments on behalf of many customer banks. This paper makes use of a simulation approach to quantify by how much tiering affects, on the one hand, concentration and credit risk and, on the...

In this paper it is shown how a Merton-model approach can be used to develop measures of the probability of failure of individual quoted UK companies. Probability estimates are then constructed for a group of failed companies and their properties as leading indicators of failure assessed....