In the past decade or so, a number of central banks have purchased assets financed by the creation of central bank reserves as a tool for loosening monetary policy – a policy often known as ‘quantitative easing' or ‘QE'. The first half of the paper reviews the international evidence on the...

This paper aims to juxtapose the theoretical and empirical literature on policy rules and targeting procedures alongside the United Kingdom's new monetary framework. For example, how does inflation targeting, as practised in the United Kingdom, compare with the optimal feedback rule for monetary...

The monetary transmission mechanism describes the channels through which changes in monetary policy affect the policy target, price inflation. Understanding the transmission mechanism is thus central to the successful conduct of monetary policy. This paper uses a Vector AutoRegressive (VAR)...

Concerns were raised about the distributional impact of the loosening in UK monetary policy following the financial crisis. We assess the impact of this loosening on well-being using household-level data and estimated utility functions. The welfare benefits are found to have been positive, in...