This paper discusses an empirical model of UK GDP growth in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The model estimates that social distancing and lockdown restrictions reduced, on average, annual UK growth by 9.7 percentage points compared to the scenario of no government action. At the other...

I discuss some of the challenges and possible responses of the economics and finance profession following the 2008-2009 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic. I do this in the context of three examples. The first example draws on the Bank of England’s forward guidance on interest rates by...

This paper examines the joint behaviour of sovereign ratings and their macroeconomic/financial determinants (namely uncertainty, GDP growth, government debt-to-GDP ratio, investment-to-GDP ratio and the fiscal balance-to-GDP ratio) in a multivariate Panel Vector Autoregressive (PVAR) framework....