Understanding the role of money in the economy has always been an important issue for policymakers. And the pickup in broad money growth and decline in credit spreads over the past three years together with more recent financial market turbulence has made it a particularly pertinent issue....

We use daily transactional ledger data from the Bank of England's Archive to test whether and to what extent the Bank of England during the mid-nineteenth century adhered to Walter Bagehot's rule that a central bank in a financial crisis should lend cash freely at a penalty rate in exchange for...

Discussion of the causes of the Great Inflation in the UK during the 1970s has centred around the relative importance of two potential explanations, which we label "bad luck" - the occurrence of unusually large commodity price and supply-side shocks - and "bad policy" reflecting failures in both...

In this paper we illustrate, using a simple model of monetary policy, the welfare costs of the private sector and/or the central bank being uncertain about the natural level of output. It turns out that monetary policy strategies that put less weight on output stabilisation can offset some of...

The payment of dividends is one of the key unresolved puzzles of company financial behaviour. This paper uncovers a more recent dividend puzzle; that of an increasing proportion of quoted UK companies omitting cash dividends. Also motivated by a desire to understand corporate balance sheet...

This paper uses tests for multiple structural breaks at unknown points in the sample period, and band-pass filtering techniques, to investigate changes in UK economic performance since the end of World War II. Empirical evidence suggests that the most recent decade, associated with the...

Because of the difficulty in measuring investment in intangible assets and frequent data revisions, estimates based on National Accounts investment data provide an imperfect measure of the capital stock. Following the influential work by Robert Hall for the United States, this paper provides an...

Simple intertemporal consumption theory implies that non-durable consumption is a random walk, but that consumption cointegrates with income and wealth. By the Granger representation theorem, there must be a (vector) error correction mechanism ((V)ECM) representation of the data; but from the...