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We introduce a new measure of own-price inflation uncertainty using firm-level data from a large and representative survey of UK businesses. Inflation uncertainty has increased significantly since the start of 2021, even as a similar measure of sales uncertainty has declined. We also find large cross-sectional differences in inflation uncertainty, with uncertainty particularly elevated for smaller firms and those in the goods sector. Finally, we show that firms that are more uncertain about their own price expectations experience higher forecast errors 12 months later. These findings suggest that inflation uncertainty may be important for understanding firm performance.

We analyse the impact of Covid-19 on productivity using data from an innovative monthly firm survey that asks for quantitative impacts of Covid-19 on inputs and outputs. We find total factor productivity (TFP) fell by up to 6% during 2020-21. The overall impact combined large reductions in ‘within-firm’ productivity, with offsetting positive ‘between-firm’ effects as less productive sectors, and less productive firms within them, contracted. Despite these large pandemic effects, firms' post-Covid forecasts imply surprisingly little lasting impact on aggregate TFP. We also see significant heterogeneity over firms and sectors, with the greatest impacts in those requiring extensive in-person activity.

In this paper, we focus on the surprising phenomenon in which firms face difficulty\ud issuing in domestic currency even in the home market, especially in emerging markets.\ud Could this be due to “original sin” which has been familiar to sovereign bond issuance?\ud In its new incarnation, original sin refers to the difficulty firms in many emerging\ud markets have in borrowing domestically long-term, even in the local currency. We infer\ud the nature of original sin from 5,901 financing decisions by firms in seven Asian emerging\ud markets over a period of 20 years. Our sample period covers an episode when bond\ud issuers had a choice between a less developed but growing onshore market, which varied\ud across countries in the level of development, and a deep and liquid offshore market. We\ud find that even in countries with onshore markets, it is often easier for unseasoned firms\ud to issue offshore (in foreign currency) than to issue onshore, but changes in market\ud development reverses this effect. In addition, once such a firm becomes a seasoned\ud issuer, it is absolved from domestic original sin and is then able to act opportunistically\ud and go to the market favored by interest differentials.

The impact of an economic shock depends both on its severity and the resilience of the economic response. Resilience can include the ability to relocate factors, for example, even when new technologies or skills are not yet at the ready. This resilience per se buffers production and has an economic value, which we estimate. The COVID-19 pandemic caused a widespread decline in recorded GDP. Yet, as catastrophic as the collapse was, it was buffered by an unprecedented and spontaneous deployment of what we call “Potential Capital,” the dwelling/residential capital and connective technologies used alongside working from home. Together potential capital and labor working from home provided additional output margins and capacity. We estimate the contribution of this capital, and the remote work that it facilitated, to have roughly halved the decline in GDP in the US reducing the fall in GDP to 9.4 log points in 2020Q2 at the trough of the recession. Similar effects are seen in the 6 OECD countries for which data are available, output fell by 14 log points, but would have fallen by 26 log points had only workplace inputs been available. Accounting for the contribution of “Potential Capital” also revises downwards estimated total productivity gains in the business sector during the pandemic from 8 log points to 5 log points in 2020Q2. We also find an output elasticity of domestic non-dwellings capital to be similar to that of workplace ICT capital, reflecting its role as productive capital. Turning to the future, changes in working from home depend upon relative costs, relative technologies and, crucially, the elasticity of substitution between home and work tasks. We estimate that that elasticity to be more than unity, meaning that the growth of ICT will raise the share of work done remotely.

This paper presents a new method to analyze the effect of shocks on time series using a quantile impulse response function (QIRF). While conventional impulse response analysis is restricted to evaluation using the conditional mean function, here, we propose an alternative impulse response analysis that traces the effect of economic shocks on the conditional quantile function. By changing the quantile index over the unit interval, it is possible to measure the effect of shocks on the entire conditional distribution of a variable of interest in our framework. Therefore we can observe the complete distributional consequences of policy interventions, especially at the upper and lower tails of the distribution as well as at the mean. Using the new approach, it becomes possible to evaluate two distinct features (called “distributional effects”): (i) a change in the dispersion of the conditional distribution of interest after a shock, and (ii) a change in the degree of skewness of the conditional distribution caused by a policy intervention. None of these features can be observed in the conventional impulse response analysis exclusively based on the conditional mean function. In addition to proposing the QIRF, our second contribution is to present a new way to jointly estimate a system of multiple quantile functions. Our proposed system quantile estimator is obtained by extending the result of Jun and Pinkse (2009) to the time series context. We illustrate the QIRF on a VAR model in a manner similar to Romer and Romer (2004) in order to assess the impact of a monetary policy shock on the US economy.

© 2018 Bank of England. Fiscal Studies © 2018 Institute for Fiscal Studies. The UK's decision to leave the EU in the 2016 referendum created substantial uncertainty for UK businesses. The nature of this uncertainty is different from that of a typical uncertainty shock because of its length, breadth and political complexity. Consequently, a new firm-level survey, the Decision Maker Panel (DMP), was created to investigate this, finding three key results. First, Brexit was reported to be one of the top three sources of uncertainty for around 40percent of UK businesses in the two years after the vote in the June 2016 referendum, and this proportion increased further in Autumn 2018. Hence, Brexit provided both a major and persistent uncertainty shock. Second, uncertainty has been higher in industries that are more dependent on trade with the EU and on EU migrant labour. Third, the uncertainties around Brexit are primarily about the impact on businesses over the longer term rather than shorter term, including uncertainty about the timing of any transition arrangements and around the nature of Brexit.

Productivity is a key determinant of the sustainability of the public finances. While the initial impact of Covid-19 on labor productivity growth shows a surprisingly positive impact, the impact on total factor productivity (TFP) is less clear. We evaluate this with new survey data on labor and capital inputs, outputs and prices from a UK firm panel survey. We find that Covid-19 reduced private sector TFP by up to 4% during the pandemic, with a projected 1% reduction over the medium term. These numbers comprise a large reduction in ‘within-firm’ productivity as intermediate costs increased due to measures like protective equipment, screens, hand sanitizer and lower capacity utilization. This was partly offset, however, by a positive ‘between-firm’ effects as less productive sectors, and less productive firms within them, contracted. This highlights how the Covid-19 shock has had large, but offsetting, within and between firm impacts on aggregate TFP.

International audience; We consider several economic uncertainty indicators for the US and UK before and during the COVID-19 pandemic: implied stock market volatility, newspaper-based policy uncertainty, Twitter chatter about economic uncertainty, subjective uncertainty about business growth, forecaster disagreement about future GDP growth, and a model-based measure of macro uncertainty. Four results emerge. First, all indicators show huge uncertainty jumps in reaction to the pandemic and its economic fallout. Indeed, most indicators reach their highest values on record. Second, peak amplitudes differ greatly – from a 35% rise for the model-based measure of US economic uncertainty (relative to January 2020) to a 20-fold rise in forecaster disagreement about UK growth. Third, time paths also differ: Implied volatility rose rapidly from late February, peaked in mid-March, and fell back by late March as stock prices began to recover. In contrast, broader measures of uncertainty peaked later and then plateaued, as job losses mounted, highlighting differences between Wall Street and Main Street uncertainty measures. Fourth, in Cholesky-identified VAR models fit to monthly U.S. data, a COVID-size uncertainty shock foreshadows peak drops in industrial production of 12–19%.

This paper develops a simple signaling model of foreign currency borrowing that yields predictions about firm survival and performance during a currency crisis. Using a large panel of firm level data for South Korea we offer empirical support for many of the predictions of our model, while others support predictions that cannot be tested using our data. Our paper demonstrates that although firms that borrow in foreign currency are more likely to exit after the currency collapses, those that continue to produce perform better. Among them, the best performers are exporters whose foreign sales are more competitively priced under a devalued currency.

We use a major new survey of UK firms, the Decision Maker Panel, to assess the impact of the June 2016 Brexit referendum. We identify three key results. First, the UK’s decision to leave the EU has generated a large, broad and long-lasting increase in uncertainty. Second, anticipation of Brexit is estimated to have gradually reduced investment by about 11% over the three years following the June 2016 vote. This fall in investment took longer to occur than predicted at the time of the referendum, suggesting that the size and persistence of this uncertainty may have delayed firms’ response to the Brexit vote. Finally, the Brexit process is estimated to have reduced UK productivity by between 2% and 5% over the three years after the referendum. Much of this drop is from negative within-firm effects, in part because firms are committing several hours per week of top-management time to Brexit planning. We also find evidence for smaller negative between-firm effects as more productive, internationally exposed, first have been more negatively impacted than less productive domestic firms.

After the global financial crisis, policy rates were cut to near-zero levels, yet, bank lending rates did not fall as much as the decline in policy rates would have suggested. If the crisis represents a structural break in the relationship between monetary policy and lending rates, how should central banks view the post-crisis transmission? This poses a major puzzle for monetary policymakers. Using a new weighted average cost of liabilities to measure banks’ effective funding costs we show a model of interest rate pass-through with dynamic panel data methods solves this puzzle, and has many other advantages over traditional approaches. It confirms central banks should focus on the cost and composition of bank liabilities, as many are now doing, to better understand and steer the dynamics of lending rates.

Central bank policy operates first through financial markets and then through banks as they adjust their interest rates. This chapter discusses the transmission of policy in this first step of the monetary transmission mechanism, known as interest-rate pass-through. Historically, the focus of attention has been the interest-rate channel. We show the origins of this channel via a microfounded model of interest-rate setting by deposit-taking institutions that are Cournot oligopolists facing adjustment costs. We then examine other channels such as the bank lending channel and the bank capital channel and the role of central bank communications, signaling, and forward guidance over future interest rates. Each is shown to influence the setting of current short-term interest rates. The chapter closes with some issues for the future of pass-through in the transmission process.

The UK’s decision to leave the EU in the 2016 referendum created substantial uncertainty for UK businesses. The nature of this uncertainty is different from that of a typical uncertainty shock because of its length, breadth and political complexity. Consequently, a new firm-level survey, the Decision Maker Panel (DMP), was created to investigate this, finding three key results. First, Brexit was reported to be one of the top three sources of uncertainty for around 40% of UK businesses in the two years after the vote in June 2016 referendum. This proportion increased further in Autumn 2018. Hence, Brexit provided both a major and persistent uncertainty shock. Second, uncertainty has been higher in industries that are more dependent on trade with the EU and on EU migrant labour. Third, the uncertainties around Brexit have been primarily about the impact on businesses over the longer term rather than shorter term, including uncertainty about the timing of any transition arrangements and around the nature of Brexit.

We use a major new survey of UK firms, the Decision Maker Panel, to assess the impact of the June 2016 Brexit referendum. We identify three key results. First, the UK’s decision to leave the EU has generated a large, broad and long-lasting increase in uncertainty. Second, anticipation of Brexit is estimated to have gradually reduced investment by about 11% over the three years following the June 2016 vote. This fall in investment took longer to occur than predicted at the time of the referendum, suggesting that the size and persistence of this uncertainty may have delayed firms’ response to the Brexit vote. Finally, the Brexit process is estimated to have reduced UK productivity by between 2% and 5% over the three years after the referendum. Much of this drop is from negative within-firm effects, in part because firms are committing several hours per week of top-management time to Brexit planning. We also find evidence for smaller negative between-firm effects as more productive, internationally exposed, firms have been more negatively impacted than less productive domestic firms. Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

International audience; This empirical paper uses a panel of about half a million observations for French firms across economic sectors to investigate how the type of inventories can affect firms' incentives to use trade credit. We find evidence that trade credit extended is influenced by the extent to which firms hold different types of inventories. Moreover, we show that the strength of the relationship varies across economic sectors. Finally, we find that as buyers process goods, the sellers' incentives to extend trade credit diminish.

The Lehman Brothers event in 2008 created a large uncertainty shock that triggered an economic slowdown lasting a decade. The macroeconomic effects are well documented, but the effect on business decisions much less so. In this paper, we explore corporate data to investigate how economic uncertainty affected investment, dividend payouts and cash holdings, based on over 10,000 UK firm-year observations. We offer new insights into the relationship between business decisions and uncertainty, by exploiting two surveys of macroeconomic uncertainty from professional forecasters and CFOs collected by the Bank of England. These data demonstrate that heightened economic uncertainty lowered investment even after controlling for investment opportunities, sales growth, and the firm’s own stock volatility. Economic uncertainty also explains the rise in cash holdings and the fall in payouts. Hence, our results help explain why UK firms invested so little and held so much cash at a time of historically low interest rates, and also why they paid out smaller dividends. These results may help explain recent sluggish productivity in the UK economy, and they also are important, because they provide a benchmark for future studies of Brexit-related uncertainty.

Large deficits have opened up on defined benefit pension schemes in the United Kingdom since 2007, and at the same time investment expenditure has been subdued; this is a common phenomenon in other countries too. We use privileged access to a unique new data set from The Pensions Regulator and two identification schemes to investigate the effects of deficits and deficit recovery plans on UK companies’ dividends, investment, wages and cash holdings. Identification is based on the close relationship between low long-term interest rates and pension deficits; and the external regulation of pension schemes by The Pensions Regulator. We show that firms with larger pension deficits voluntarily pay lower dividends, but they do not invest less. However, firms that are required to make deficit recovery contributions by the regulator have lower dividend and investment expenditure compared to other firms, and more so if they are financially constrained. These effects are large for some individual companies, but macroeconomically small compared to the stimulus offered by the Bank of England’s quantitative easing policy.

Periodically a major financial innovation creates a new product class that changes the financial landscape. Examples include junk bonds that enabled leveraged buyouts, securitization that stimulated off balance sheet growth in banks, and credit default swaps that offered pure trading in credit risk. Now new renminbi financial products are emerging as China opens its capital account, providing new opportunities for innovation in corporate finance that will promote financial stability and sustainable growth in China. This study illustrates the rapid growth in the use of these new products by Chinese and overseas firms. We use diffusion models to explore how participation in this market is influenced by greater depth and liquidity of the market, lower costs of issuance and greater expected appreciation of the renminbi against the US dollar. Understanding these offshore developments will help support smoother innovation in the onshore corporate bond market.

Background We examined the prevalence of acute kidney injury (AKI) risk factors in the emergency medical unit, generated a modified risk assessment tool and tested its ability to predict AKI. \ud \ud \ud Methods A total of 1196 patients admitted to medical admission units were assessed for patient-associated AKI risk factors. Subsequently, 898 patients were assessed for a limited number of fixed risk factors with the addition of hypotension and sepsis. This was correlated to AKI episodes. \ud \ud \ud Results In the first cohort, the prevalence of AKI risk factors was 2.1 ± 2.0 per patient, with a positive relationship between age and the number of risk factors and a higher number of risk factors in patients ≥65 years. In the second cohort, 12.3% presented with or developed AKI. Patients with AKI were older and had a higher number of AKI risk factors. In the AKI cohort, 72% of the patients had two or more AKI risk factors compared with 43% of the cohort with no AKI. When age ≥65 years was added as an independent risk factor, 84% of those with AKI had two or more AKI risk factors compared with 55% of those with no AKI. Receiver operating characteristic analysis suggests that the use of common patient-associated known AKI risk factors performs no better than age alone as a predictor of AKI. \ud \ud \ud Conclusions Detailed assessment of well-established patient-associated AKI risk factors may not facilitate clinicians to apportion risk. This suggests that additional work is required to develop a more sensitive validated AKI-predictive tool that would be useful in this clinical setting.

Empirical investigation of the external finance premium has been conducted on the margin between internal finance and bank borrowing or equities but little attention has been given to corporate bonds, especially for the emerging Asian market. In this paper, we hypothesize that balance sheet indicators of creditworthiness could affect the external finance premium for bonds as they do for premia in other markets. Using bond-specific and firm-specific data for China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Korea, Philippines, Singapore and Thailand during 1995–2009 we find that firms with better financial health face lower external finance premia in all countries. When we introduce firm-level heterogeneity, we show that financial variables appear to be both statistically and quantitatively more important for financially constrained firms. Finally, when we examine the effects of the 1997–1998 Asian crisis and the 2007–2009 global financial crisis, we find that the sensitivity of the premium is greater for constrained firms during the Asian crisis compared to other times.

This paper uses a modified New Keynesian framework to consider the use of monetary information in making monetary policy decisions. We add monetary indicators derived from theoretical models to conventional economic variables in an instrument rule and estimate the equations using euroarea and UK data recognizing that interest rates are set discretely. There is an improvement in the ability to predict changes in interest rates when we introduce monetary indicators which is robust to alternative model specifications. This result adds to a growing literature on the role of monetary indicators showing that this information helps predict interest rate decisions as well as inflation.

In this paper we investigate the ability of a number of different ordered probit models to predict ratings based on firm-specific data on business and financial risks. We investigate models which are based on momentum, drift and ageing, and compare them with alternatives which take the initial rating of the firm and its previous actual rating into account. Using data on US bond issuing firms, as rated by Fitch, over the years 2000 to 2007, we compare the performances of these models for predicting the ratings both in-sample and out-of-sample using root mean squared errors, Diebold-Mariano tests of forecast performance and contingency tables. We conclude that both initial and previous states have a substantial influence on rating prediction.

The importance of truncated distributions for bias in estimation is demonstrated for a Japanese policy reaction function. Due to the proximity of a zero lower bound (ZLB) on interest rates, coefficient estimates can be biased upwards. This paper illustrates the importance of measuring and correcting estimates for this bias using Japan's unique experience of prolonged low inflation/deflation.

This paper offers a new approach that estimates the response of interest rates to inflation and the output gap at various points (quantiles) on the conditional distribution of interest rates. This offers an improvement on empirical estimates conducted only at the mean and also allows us to test the propositions that policy shows greater aggression to inflation in the reaction function in terms of a greater response coefficient as interest rates reach low levels, and increasing aggression as the lower bound is approached. We find support for the Taylor principle, a more aggressive response to inflation than under a Taylor rule, but no detectable evidence of increasing aggression as the zero lower bound is approached in the US and Japan.

This paper provides non-parametric tests of the correspondence between the ‘words’ on price stability from the ECB President's statement and future interest rate changes. It also indicates the commonality of the signal between these indicators of pressure on price stability.

Trade credit is an important source of finance for firms and has been well researched, but the focus has been on financial trade-offs. In this paper, we consider the trade-offs with inventories and develop a simple model that recognizes the incentives a firm faces to offer and receive trade credit. Our model identifies the response of accounts payable and accounts receivable to changes in the cost of inventories, profitability, risk and liquidity, and importantly, this influence operates through a production channel. Our results support the model and complement many existing studies focused on explaining the financial terms of trade credit.

This paper considers the functional relationship between relative price variability (RPV) and inflation using quarterly personal consumer expenditure data in the US over 1967q1–2003q1, deriving some implications for monetary policy. Non-parametric regression techniques are used to explore the shape of the RPV function, and this shape is related to the theory outlined by Rotemberg (1982, 1983). The empirical RPV function yields a plausible ‘optimal’ value of inflation in the region of five percentage points, which is consistent with this theory and lies within the range of values cited by recent evaluations of ‘sand’ and ‘grease’ effects.

Making accurate forecasts of the future direction of interest rates is a vital element when making economic decisions. The focus on central banks as they make decisions about the future direction of interest rates requires the forecaster to assess the likely outcome of committee decisions based on new information since the previous meeting. We characterize this process as a dynamic ordered probit process that uses information to decide between three possible outcomes for interest rates: an increase, decrease or no-change. When we analyze the predictive ability of two information sets, we find that the approach has predictive ability both in-sample and out-of-sample that helps forecast the direction of future rates.

This paper links two separate empirical literatures on inflation, relative price variability (RPV) and the price–cost markup. Measures constructed from annual and quarterly data for the US and UK are used to examine the nature of the relationships among these variables. The results show that two long-run relationships can be identified from the data: a negative relationship between inflation and the markup and a positive relationship between inflation and RPV. We eliminate the possibility that inflation is a proxy for RPV in the inflation–markup relationship and show systems estimates to be superior to single-equation estimates.

Many studies consider the aggregate impact of crises on output and the fiscal cost of reconstruction, but few studies of the impact of a crisis at the level of the firm. In this paper we consider the impact of the Brazilian crisis of 1999 on the extensive and intensive margin of exporters versus non-exporters. Using a unified theoretical framework based on a two-sector extension of the combined fixed and variable investment versions of the Holmström and Tirole (1997) closed-economy model, we explore predictors that firms will engage in global markets and export more intensively. Our results based on a detailed firm-level panel of data for Brazilian 52,667 firms from 1995-2007, show that the decision to export and increase export sales is driven by size, the debt ratio, the current ratio and operating costs as well as the direct impact of the crisis itself. The findings suggest that the mechanism is driven by the response of the credit market to the creditworthiness of the firm as it is by changing terms of trade.

After the global finance crisis short-term policy rates were cut to near-zero levels, yet, bank lending rates did not fall as much as the decline in policy rates would have suggested. If the crisis represents a structural break in the relationship between policy rates and lending rates, how should central banks view the post-crisis transmission of policy to lending rates? This poses a major puzzle for monetary policymakers. Using a new weighted average cost of liabilities to measure banks’ effective funding costs we show a model of interest rate pass-through with dynamic panel data methods solves this puzzle, and has many other advantages over policy rates. It suggests central banks should focus on the cost of bank liabilities more broadly to understand the dynamics of lending rates.

This paper investigates the role of trade credit in the transmission of monetary policy. Most models of the transmission mechanism allow the firm to access only financial markets or bank lending according to some net worth criterion. In our model we introduce trade credit as an additional source of funding. We predict that when monetary policy tightens there will be a reduction in market and bank lending, and an increase in trade credit. This is confirmed with an empirical investigation of 16,000 manufacturing firms.

This article addresses two fundamental questions about monetary policy, credit conditions and corporate activity. First, can we relate differences in the composition of debt between tight and loose periods of monetary policy to firm characteristics like size, age, indebtedness or risk? Second, do differences in companies' financial compositions matter for real activity of firms such as inventory and employment growth? The article offers some evidence from firms in the UK manufacturing sector which suggests that the composition of debt differs considerably with characteristics such as size, age, debt and risk, it also shows a significant effect from financial composition and cash flow to inventory and employment growth. (JEL codes: E32, E44, E51) Copyright 2006, Oxford University Press.

This paper examines firms’ access to bank and market finance when allowance is made for differences in firm-specific characteristics. A theoretical model determines the characteristics such as size, risk and debt that would determine firms’ access to bank or market finance; these characteristics can result in greater (or lesser) tightening of credit when interest rates increase. An empirical evaluation of the predictions of the model is conducted on a large panel of UK manufacturing firms. We confirm that small, young and risky firms are more significantly affected by tight monetary conditions than large, old and secure firms.

In emerging Asia's local-currency bond market, the government bond segments have largely come of age while the corporate bond markets have remained immature. This paper focuses on the question of what drives corporate bond issuance, an issue of great practical relevance for policymakers in the region. We analyse the financing decisions of some 4,600 firms in eight countries in emerging Asia. We analyse these decisions within the context of the firms'capital structure. We also analyse the effect of market depth, relying on market-wide indicators from the BIS. We find that for both seasoned and unseasoned issuers, size and leverage both matter for the decision to issue. The availability of tangible assets matters for the decision to issue in foreign currency. At the level of the markets, the depth of the market and interest differentials matter.

Previous research has investigated consumers' expenditure and money demand as separable equations. We estimate them jointly as driven by the same influences. Credit is also included as a potential third variable that might provide a source of additional information about the monetary transmission mechanism. Consumption, money, and lending equations are modelled as an interdependent system, and the significance of lending for consumption andmoney is tested. Theresults using UK household sector data show that a stable credit equation does exist in parallel with money demand and consumption equations, and that interactions modelled in a conditional vector equilibrium correction system are favoured over independent equations.

This paper reports estimates of an econometric model of the determinants of OFCs’ broad money holding and M4 lending to OFCs. This is of interest both as providing information about a component of UK money and credit aggregates and because it provides some evidence of the link between financial activity and growth of the real economy. We model the long-run equilibria for money holding and lending to this sector as being driven by GDP, wealth, the return to financial services and various interest spreads. The dynamics of OFCs’ money and lending are shown to be interdependent. We then consider the evidence for interactions between OFCs and other sectors. Our results indicate that M4 lending to OFCs is significantly related to aggregate investment in the long run, but is largely unrelated to the spending of households. Copyright # 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Official interest rate changes should influence short rates on money market instruments and retail products, such as deposit accounts and mortgages, but complete pass-through is often taken for granted. This paper provides a theoretical and econometric framework for assessing the evidence for this assumption using seventeen years of monthly data for rates on thirteen deposit and mortgage products offered by individual UK financial institutions. The methodology allows for asymmetries and non-linearities in adjustment and the results show that the speed of adjustment in retail rates depends on whether the perceived 'gap' between retail and base rates is widening or narrowing.

This paper examines the impact of monetary policy on firms' access to bank and market finance when allowance is made for differences in firm-specific characteristics. A theoretical model determines the cut-off values for project profitability that would allow firms to access bank or market finance. This model predicts that specific characteristics in terms of size, age, risk and debt can make a firm more vulnerable to tightening credit when interest rates increase. Empirically, the paper shows, using a panel of 16,000 UK firm records over 10 years, that firms distributed according to their type (asset size, rating etc) do have differing access to bank lending and market finance. Small, young and risky firms are more significantly affected by tight monetary conditions than large, old and secure firms. The evidence is consistent with a credit channel, and demonstrates that there are distributional implications from tightening monetary policy.

In this paper we consider the additional information to be derived from modelling lending, investment and money in a jointly determined system of equations. We allow demand- and supply-side effects to influence the money, investment and lending equations. Using UK corporate data, we find acceptable equilibrium equations for investment, lending and money with a causal chain running from money and lending to investment and money to lending in a dynamic model. There is clear support for ‘value added’ from a lending equation and support for interactions between financial variables and real economic activity.

The literatures on net corporate borrowing and stockbuilding by firms are both based on a simple linear-quadratic (L-Q) model, but they have been developed independently. This paper explores the possibility that a firm may jointly optimise its borrowing and stockbuilding decisions, where previous papers have imposed ‘decision rule decompositions’. The resulting model is estimated using UK corporate data and demonstrates that net corporate borrowing and stockbuilding are indeed used as substitutes in production smoothing.

Studies have focused heavily on money in the transmission mechanism of monetary policy. In this article we explore the empirical importance of credit. The paper provides a framework in which to analyse the balance sheets of, and financial flows between, different sectors of the UK economy, and an econometric model of the interactions between non-financial firms, households and credit offered by banks and non-bank financial intermediaries. The paper also provides a dynamic structural model of bank and building society credit, money and decisions to consume and invest and then adds credit from non-bank financial intermediaries. Our bottom line is that credit is an important part of the transmission process of UK monetary policy.