This paper examines the macroeconomic impact of the first round of quantitative easing (QE) by the Bank of England which started in March 2009. Although Bank Rate, the UK policy rate, was reduced to ½%, effectively its lower bound, the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee felt that additional...

This paper carries out a systematic investigation into the possibility of structural shifts in the UK economy using a Markov-switching dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model. We find strong evidence for shifts in the structural parameters of several equations of the DSGE model. In...

This paper uses a factor-augmented vector autoregression technique to examine the role that macroeconomic and sector-specific factors play in UK price fluctuations at the aggregate and disaggregated levels. Macroeconomic factors are less important for disaggregated prices than aggregate ones....

This paper assesses various capital and labour adjustment costs functions estimating a general equilibrium framework with Bayesian methods using US aggregate data. The estimation reveals that the adjustment costs are convex in both capital and labour and allowing for their joint interaction is...

Using a switching regression technique we provide unique evidence on three questions concerning the consumption behaviour of UK households. First, what percentage of households display excess sensitivity to income? Second, what affects the likelihood of being in that group? Third, is there a...

This paper proposes an empirical model which can be used to estimate the impact of changes in the volatility of shocks to US real activity on the UK economy. The proposed empirical model is a structural VAR where the volatility of structural shocks is time varying and is allowed to affect the...

This paper examines how the interaction between inflation expectations and nominal and real macroeconomic variables has evolved for the United Kingdom over the post-WWII period until 2007. We model time-variation through a Markov-switching structural vector autoregressive framework with variants...

In this paper we estimate the rate of exchange rate pass-through (ERPT) into UK import prices using disaggregate data at the SITC-2 and SITC-3 digit level. Consistent with earlier studies, we find evidence for significant heterogeneity among the estimated industry-specific pass-through rates. In...

This paper studies the dynamic response of labour input to neutral technology shocks. It uses a standard real business cycle model enriched with labour market search and matching frictions and investment-specific technological progress that enables a new, agnostic, identification scheme based on...

Several industrialised countries have had a similar inflation experience in the past 30 years, with inflation high and volatile in the 1970s and the 1980s but low and stable in the most recent period. We explore the dynamics of inflation in these countries via a time-varying factor model. This...