This paper quantifies some of the costs of inflation in the United Kingdom. It focuses in particular on inflation distortions under an imperfectly indexed tax system and distortions to money demand. In the United States, an earlier study by Feldstein found that lowering inflation by 2 percentage...

The demands on a person's time vary over their working life, so that the years in which they might be expected to devote most time to work may also be the period when other commitments, such as bringing up children, are most pressing. Estimates of the intertemporal labour supply elasticity that...

This paper uses a simple model to examine the links between equity price movements and consumption and investment. Generally, the effect of a given movement in equity prices on consumption depends on the underlying source of the shock to equity prices, and some empirical evidence is presented...

IMF programmes are frequently criticised for lacking focus and being ineffective in helping maintain private credit lines following a debt crisis. A theoretical model is developed to explore the interlinkages between result-based conditionality and creditor collective action problems. The...

The Bank of England has constructed a ‘suite of statistical forecasting models’ (the ‘Suite’) providing judgement-free statistical forecasts of inflation and output growth as one of many inputs into the forecasting process, and to offer measures of relevant news in the data. The Suite...

Using post-war data on 43 countries, this paper shows that the finding that the trade-off between inflation and output falls as inflation rises is quite robust. The implication is that the real effects of monetary policy might be greater as the economy moves towards price stability. The paper...

The performance of six alternative models in accounting for UK labour market behaviour over the business cycle is examined. Models are assessed in terms of their ability to mimic actual cycle correlations and volatility, their success in replicating persistence, and their success in modelling...

We exploit the marked changes in UK monetary arrangements since the metallic standards era to investigate continuity and changes across monetary regimes in key macroeconomic stylised facts in the United Kingdom. We find that, historically, inflation persistence has been the exception, rather...

This paper presents some econometric modelling of M4 balances. It extends earlier Bank research on M4 by looking separately at personal and corporate holdings of money, and applies some recent advances in econometric methodology. The results confirm the importance of sectoral analysis. The...

Contrary to theory, recent empirical work suggests that changing default expectations can explain only a fraction of the variability in credit spreads. This paper takes a fresh look at this question, relating credit spreads for a sample of investment-grade bonds issued by UK industrial companies...