We introduce a novel data set to analyze the impact of the Covid-19 crisis on SME cash flows. The crisis led to a sharp drop in economic activity in the UK, which hit SMEs harder than larger businesses. The data set comprises monthly information on all 2 million SMEs that have current accounts...

The Covid-19 crisis led to a sharp drop in economic activity in the UK, which hit small and medium enterprises (SMEs) harder than larger businesses. We introduce a novel loan level dataset for 2 million UK SMEs (~5 billion data points) to document a few important facts during Covid-19: (1) The...

We ask whether uncertainty about interest rates is important for economic activity. Causal effects of uncertainty on the economy are examined through the lens of a small VAR where the assumption that uncertainty and real activity cannot contemporaneously react to each other is indeed in line...

We ask whether uncertainty about interest rates is important for economic activity. Effects of interest rate uncertainty on the economy are examined through the lens of a small VAR where the assumption that uncertainty can affect real activity contemporaneously but not vice versa is indeed in...

Theory and evidence suggest that in an environment of well-anchored expectations, temporary news or shocks to economic variables, should not affect agents ́expectations of inflation in the long term. Our estimated structural VARs show that both long- and short-term inflation expectations are...

This article introduces a special issue of the Journal of Banking Regulation dedicated to data. The special issue is based on papers from a seminar held at the Bank of England in January 2013. In this article I examine the shift to increasingly micro-level data sets in the analysis done by...