This article examines recent developments in household balance sheets using disaggregated data from an annual survey carried out by NMG Consulting on behalf of the Bank. The survey indicates that household debt levels remain well above historical averages, but are little changed since last year....

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...

The Bank of England introduced the Special Liquidity Scheme (SLS) in April 2008 to improve the liquidity position of the UK banking system. It did so by helping banks finance assets that had got stuck on their balance sheets following the closure of some asset-backed securities markets from 2007...

We have developed a structural model to explain defined benefit (DB) pension funds' investment behaviour. The model is calibrated to the aggregate UK DB pension fund and four different cohorts of funds. We use the model to estimate how pension funds can be expected to adjust their asset...

We provide evidence on how corporate bond investors react to a change in yields, and how this behaviour differs in times of market‐wide stress. We also investigate ‘reaching for yield' across investor types, as well as providing insights into the structure of the corporate bond market. Using...

We study the network structure and resilience of the sterling investment-grade and high-yield corporate bond markets. Using proprietary, transaction-level data, first we analyse the key properties of the trading networks in these markets. We find that the trading networks exhibit a...