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...

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 latter half of the 1990s saw a sharp rise in entry of banks from developed countries into emerging market financial systems. This was motivated by, among other things, the belief that expansion into underdeveloped financial markets would result in diversification and efficiency gains, and...

The recent financial crisis was accompanied by an unprecedented deterioration in businesses’ expectations for future economic activity. This article examines the strength of the signal that measures of these expectations have provided for output growth in the past. Recessions have typically...

Can the knife-edge restriction on technology imposed by standard endogenous growth models be relaxed by allowing for nonrenewable resources entering the technology? To answer this question we examine whether stable endogenous growth is compatible with increasing returns to scale with respect to...

We develop a method of quantifying the uncertainty surrounding the estimates of the fundamental inflation implied by the New Keynesian Phillips Curve (NKPC). The uncertainty is represented as a band around the fundamental inflation, and encompasses the sampling uncertainty of both the estimates...

This paper introduces the Bank of England's new forecasting platform and provides examples of how it can be applied to practical forecasting problems. The platform consists of four components: COMPASS, a structural central organising model; a suite of models, used to fill in the gaps in the...

In a model with heterogenous agents, wage setting by monopoly unions and monetary policy conducted by a central bank, we show that the duration of nominal wage contracts is u-shaped in the degree of centralization, with intermediate bargaining systems yielding contracts of shorter duration and...

This paper constructs estimates of total factor productivity (TFP) growth for the United Kingdom for the period 1970-2000, using an industry data set that spans the whole economy. The estimates are obtained by controlling for variable utilisation of capital and labour, and costs of adjusting...