In July 2020, the UK government reduced the VAT rate on hospitality services from 20% to 5% as an emergency policy intervention. Using a novel dataset of detailed hotel room characteristics in UK and elsewhere, we estimate how much the tax cut was passed on to consumers via a price reduction. We...

In July 2020, the UK government reduced the VAT rate on hospitality services from 20% to 5%, as response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We compile a novel dataset of detailed hotel room characteristics around this policy action in order to estimate how much the tax cut was passed on to consumers via...

We estimate forward-looking interest-rate reaction functions for the G3 economies and for a group of countries which recently adopted inflation targets. Some significant shifts in the conduct of monetary policy are detected in the G3 countries, especially in the USA and Japan. In contrast with...