Bank of England Working Papers - Abstracts 2007 (no. 318 - 336)

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The following are brief abstracts of working papers. Those papers that are out of print are marked as such (oop). For details of how to obtain copies of working papers, both in and out of print, see the Working Papers main page.

You can also view the full text of working papers 23 and 24 (from 1994) and working papers since 1997 as PDF files, readable with the latest version of Adobe Acrobat (this is available free from Adobe's Website ). The working papers are listed with the most recent papers first.

Working Paper No 336
A state space approach to extracting the signal from uncertain data
Alastair Cunningham, Jana Eklund, Christopher Jeffery, George Kapetanios and Vincent Labhard
(323k)

Most macroeconomic data are uncertain - they are estimates rather than perfect measures. Use of these uncertain data to form an assessment of current activity can be viewed as a problem of signal extraction. One symptom of that uncertainty is the propensity of statistical agencies to revise their estimates in the light of new information or methodological advances. This paper sets out an approach to extracting the signal from uncertain data that takes the experience of past revisions as representative of the uncertainties surrounding the latest published estimates. Specifically, it describes a two-step estimation procedure in which the history of past revisions (real-time data) are first used to estimate the parameters of a measurement equation describing the official published estimates; and these parameters are then imposed in a maximum likelihood estimation of a state space representation of the 'true' profile of the macroeconomic variable.

Working Paper No 335
Business cycle fluctuations and excess sensitivity of private consumption
Gert Peersman and Lorenzo Pozzi
(208k)

We investigate whether business cycle fluctuations affect the degree of excess sensitivity of private consumption growth to disposable income growth. Using multivariate state space methods and quarterly US data for the period 1965-2000 we find that excess sensitivity is significantly higher during recessions.

Working Paper No 334
Using copulas to construct bivariate foreign exchange distributions with an application to the sterling exchange rate index
Matthew Hurd, Mark Salmon and Christoph Schleicher
(587k)

We model the joint risk-neutral distribution of the euro-sterling and the dollar-sterling exchange rates using option-implied marginal distributions that are connected via a copula function that satisfies the triangular no-arbitrage condition. We then derive a univariate distribution for a simplified sterling effective exchange rate index. Our results indicate that standard parametric copula functions, such as the commonly used Normal and Frank copulas, fail to capture the degree of asymmetry observed in the data. We overcome this problem by using a non-parametric dependence function in the form of a Bernstein copula which is shown to produce a very close fit. We further give an example of how our approach can be used to price currency index options.

Working Paper No 333
Labour market institutions and aggregate fluctuations in a search and matching model
Francesco Zanetti
(240k)

This paper explores the influence of some key institutional features of the labour market on aggregate fluctuations. It uses a dynamic, stochastic, general equilibrium model characterised by search and matching frictions in the labour market and nominal rigidities in the goods market. It finds that firing costs and unemployment benefits can have substantial effects on aggregate fluctuations. Increasing firing costs decreases the volatility of output, employment and job flows, due to the reduction of the mass of jobs sensitive to disturbances and lower incentives for firms to hire and fire workers. Hence, firms adjust to shocks mainly through prices, and inflation then becomes more volatile. Raising unemployment benefits has the reverse effect on aggregate fluctuations.

Working Paper No 332
Investment adjustment costs: evidence from UK and US industries
Charlotta Groth and Hashmat Khan
(290k)

In aggregate models, costs that penalise changes in investment - investment adjustment costs - have been introduced to help account for a variety of business cycle and asset market phenomena. In this paper, we evaluate empirical evidence for these types of costs using US and UK industry data. We consider a general adjustment cost structure which nests both investment adjustment costs and the traditional capital adjustment costs as special cases. The estimated weight on the former is close to zero for all the industries. When only the investment adjustment cost structure is considered, the estimates of the adjustment cost parameter are small relative to those based on aggregate data, and imply an elasticity of investment with respect to the shadow price of capital (the value to the firm of one additional unit of capital) fifteen times larger than that found in aggregate studies. Our results suggest that from a disaggregated empirical perspective it remains difficult to motivate and interpret the investment friction considered in recent macroeconomic models.

Working Paper No 331
Wage flexibility in Britain: some micro and macro evidence
Mark E Schweitzer
(257k)

This paper uses the British New Earnings Survey (NES) to derive both macro and micro measures of wage rigidities. The data set spans the 1975-2000 period, with wage observations covering approximately 1% of the British workforce. Using this data set, we consider whether wages have become more flexible in recent years. Evidence drawn from macroeconomic wage equation estimates suggests that, while the relationship between wages and unemployment seems to have changed, the responsiveness of wages to unemployment rates has declined in the 1990s. In contrast to previous findings, these results suggest that wages have become less flexible. Micro tests mainly reveal that the prevalence of nominal rigidities has not declined, although there is weak evidence for a decline in the most recent years. Micro tests of wage rigidities also include an analysis of real wage rigidities. There is evidence in the NES of spikes in the wage-change distribution at the rate of inflation, beyond what would be anticipated from the rest of the distribution, suggesting the presence of real wage rigidities. This evidence is shown to be statistically significant, and points to an increase in real rigidities over the period of study.

Working Paper No 330
Escaping Nash and volatile inflation
Martin Ellison and Tony Yates
(201k)

Why is inflation so much lower and at the same time more stable in developed economies in the 1990s, compared with the 1970s? This paper suggests that the United Kingdom, United States and other countries may have escaped from a volatile inflation equilibrium. Our argument builds on the story proposed by Tom Sargent in The conquest of American inflation, where the fall in inflation in the 1980s was attributed to the changing beliefs informing monetary policy. To explain the escape in inflation volatility, we unwind one of Sargent's simplifications and allow the monetary authority to react to some of the shocks in the economy. In this new model, a revised account of recent history is that when the evidence turned against the existence of a long-run inflation-output trade-off in the 1980s there was an escape from high inflation, but the authorities were also persuaded to stop using changes in inflation to offset shocks. Inflation and inflation volatility therefore escaped in tandem. Our analysis also sheds some light on why the escape in inflation occurred at the time it did. Our model, like the Sargent model it derives from, omits the revolution in institutional design and understanding that underpins monetary policy. So the gloomy predictions for the future derived from a literal reading of it are likely to be unfounded.

Working Paper No 329
The impact of yuan revaluation on the Asian region
Glenn Hoggarth and Hui Tong
(184k)

This paper studies how an appreciation of the yuan affects the exports of other Asian countries. It finds mixed effects. Countries that export consumer goods to China or compete in third markets benefit from yuan appreciation, while countries that supply capital goods to China lose. These findings suggest that a revaluation of the yuan may not lead to a generalised revaluation of Asian currencies.

Working Paper No 328
Cash-in-the-market pricing and optimal resolution of bank failures
Viral Acharya and Tanju Yorulmazer
(438k)

As the number of bank failures increases, the set of assets available for acquisition by the surviving banks enlarges but the total amount of available liquidity within the surviving banks falls. This results in 'cash-in-the-market' pricing for liquidation of banking assets. At a sufficiently large number of bank failures, and in turn, at a sufficiently low level of asset prices, there are too many banks to liquidate and inefficient users of assets who are liquidity-endowed may end up owning the liquidated assets. In order to avoid this allocation inefficiency, it may be ex-post optimal for the regulator to bail out some failed banks. We show however that there exists a policy that involves liquidity assistance to surviving banks in the purchase of failed banks and that is equivalent to the bailout policy from an ex-post standpoint. Crucially, the liquidity provision policy gives banks incentives to differentiate, rather than to herd, makes aggregate banking crises less likely, and, thereby dominates the bailout policy from an ex-ante standpoint.

Working Paper No 327
A model of market surprises
Lavan Mahadeva
(365k)

This paper presents a theory to link improvements in transparency about monetary policy objectives to improvements in transparency about monetary policy actions and then to the conditional volatility of market expectations of policy rates. Crucially, policy announcements act not just as an instrument but also as a beacon that can potentially communicate information to agents about the policymakers' reactions to shocks. When the objectives of policymakers are not made transparent, agents are more likely to interpret any accommodation to price shocks as indicating that policymakers are following their own unobserved suboptimal objectives. Policymakers in these regimes are therefore less inclined to be transparent in their explanations. Conversely when policy objectives are more clearly defined, policymakers become more transparent in their explanations too. Then, the less markets will be surprised by interest rate announcements. I show that happens at a diminishing rate: as transparency is improved further from already high levels, there is less of a reduction in the variance of market surprises. The reason is that agents know that they can rely more on the monetary policy beacon in very transparent regimes. Hence they become more active in their decision-making and policymakers take that extra sensitivity into account. The model illustrates the gains to having clearly defined policy objectives. It also explains how a continued occurrence of market surprises, after an initial large reduction, could be consistent with the greater transparency and more precisely formed inflation expectations.

Working Paper No 326
Asset pricing implications of a New Keynesian model
Bianca De Paoli, Alasdair Scott and Olaf Weeken
(435k)

Text file of the code (39k)
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To match the stylised facts of goods and labour markets, the canonical New Keynesian model augments the optimising neoclassical growth model with nominal and real rigidities. We ask what the implications of this type of model are for asset prices. Using a second-order approximation, we examine bond and equity returns, the equity risk premium, and the behaviour of the real and nominal term structure. We catalogue the factors that are most important for determining the size of risk premia and the slope and level of the yield curve. In a world of technology shocks only, increasing the degree of real rigidities raises risk premia and increasing nominal rigidities reduces risk premia. In a world of monetary policy shocks only, both real and nominal rigidities raise risk premia. The results indicate that the implications of the New Keynesian model for average asset returns depend critically on the characterisation of shocks hitting the model economy.

Working Paper No 325
Inter-industry contagion between UK life insurers and UK banks: an event study
Marco Stringa and Allan Monks
(514k)

Understanding interlinkages in a financial system is an integral part of the assessment of its stability. This paper employs an event study technique to assess the significance of interlinkages from the UK life insurance sector to the UK banking system in times of stress. The paper uses a thorough methodology to enhance standard event study techniques by adjusting for autocorrelation and heteroskedasticity when calculating the abnormal returns' forecast errors and for the offsetting effects in cumulative abnormal returns. We take an original approach by introducing the use of trading volumes to detect significant reactions not captured by the use of equity prices. The paper shows evidence of interlinkages from the UK life insurance to the UK banking sector, and concludes that contagion is driven by banks' ownership of life insurance assets and only occurs during events that have hit the life insurance sector as a whole.

Working Paper No 324
Housing equity as a buffer: evidence from UK households
Andrew Benito
(456k)

The decision to extract home equity is examined using household-level data for the United Kingdom, 1993 to 2003. At its peak during the period, around one in ten homeowners withdrew equity per year. The paper finds that the equity withdrawal decision conforms to predictions from the standard life-cycle framework and models that predict its use as a financial buffer. The paper also estimates responses to the large house price appreciation and significant reductions in mortgage rates seen during the period. This has implications for the size of the 'collateral channel' and credit channel models of monetary policy.

Working Paper No 323
Forecast combination and the Bank of England's suite of statistical forecasting models
George Kapetanios, Vincent Labhard and Simon Price
(300k)

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 combines a small number of forecasts generated using different sources of information and methodologies. The main combination methods employ weights that are equal or based on the Akaike information criterion (using likelihoods built from estimation errors). This paper sets a general context for this exercise, and describes some features of the Suite as it stood in May 2005. The forecasts are evaluated over the period of Bank independence (1997 Q2 to 2005 Q1) by a mean square error criterion. The forecast combinations generally lead to a reduction in forecast error, although over this period some of the benchmark models are hard to beat.

Working Paper No 322
An affine macro-factor model of the UK yield curve
Peter Lildholdt, Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou and Chris Peacock
(833k)

This paper estimates yield curve models for the United Kingdom, where the underlying determinants have a macroeconomic interpretation. The first factor is an unobserved inflation target, the second factor is annual inflation, and the third factor is a 'Taylor rule residual', which, among other things, captures the effects of the output gap and monetary policy surprises in the Taylor rule. We find that the long end of the yield curve is primarily driven by changes in the unobserved inflation target. At shorter maturities, yield curve movements reflect short-run inflation and the Taylor rule residual. For holding periods of one month, our preferred model implies that agents require compensation for risks associated with cyclical and inflation shocks but do not require compensation for shocks to the inflation target. For holding periods beyond one month, agents require compensation for all three sources of risks. Time series of risk premia on long forward rates from the preferred yield curve model have declined since the 1970s, which is consistent with perceptions of declining macroeconomic uncertainty or perhaps more efficient macroeconomic stabilisation policies. Model-implied risk premia at short maturities match up reasonably well with survey-based risk premia, which indicates that the model could be useful for the purpose of extracting market-based interest rate expectations.

Working Paper No 321
Comparing the pre-settlement risk implications of alternative clearing arrangements
John P Jackson and Mark J Manning
(307k)

In recent years, there has been a marked expansion in the range of products cleared through central counterparty clearing houses, accompanied by a trend towards consolidation in the clearing infrastructure. The financial stability implications of these developments are of considerable policy interest. In this paper, we use a simulation approach to analyse, in a systematic way, the potential pre-settlement cost and risk implications of these developments. Our results point towards substantial risk-reduction benefits from multilateral clearing arrangements, arising from multilateral netting and mutualisation. The paper also examines individual incentives to join multilateral clearing arrangements. We suggest that arrangements with restricted direct participation and tiered membership may be a natural response to the uneven distribution of total pre-settlement costs when agents are of heterogeneous credit quality and it is costly to individually tailor margin.

Working Paper No 320
The real exchange rate and quality improvements
Karen Dury and Özlem Oomen
(399k)

This paper studies how the real exchange rate might respond to product innovation (improvements in the quality of goods) as opposed to process innovation (increased efficiency in the production of goods). We develop a two-country dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model, where quality improvements affect both the demand and the supply side of the economy. We show that the real exchange rate defined in terms of prices per quality unit (quality-adjusted prices) does not always move in the same direction as that defined in terms of unit prices (quality-unadjusted prices), illustrating the importance of measuring quality correctly.

Working Paper No 319
Too many to fail - an analysis of time-inconsistency in bank closure policies
Viral Acharya and Tanju Yorulmazer
(450k)

While the 'too-big-to-fail' guarantee is explicitly a part of bank regulation in many countries, this paper shows that bank closure policies also suffer from an implicit 'too-many-to-fail' problem: when the number of bank failures is large, the regulator finds it ex-post optimal to bail out some or all failed banks, whereas when the number of bank failures is small, failed banks can be acquired by the surviving banks. This gives banks incentives to herd and increases the risk that many banks may fail together. The ex-post optimal regulation may thus be time-inconsistent or suboptimal from an ex-ante standpoint. In contrast to the too-big-to-fail problem which mainly affects large banks, we show that the too-many-to-fail problem affects small banks more by giving them stronger incentives to herd.

Working Paper No 318
Does Asia's choice of exchange rate regime affect Europe's exposure to US shocks?
Bojan Markovic and Laura Povoledo
(666k)

In this paper we use a stylised three-country model to analyse how the transmission of US shocks to Europe might be affected by Asia's choice of exchange rate regime. We find that if Asia decides to peg her exchange rate to the dollar, the impact of US shocks on European output and inflation is likely to be bigger than it otherwise would have been. This happens because, without nominal exchange rate flexibility, Asian firms react to the shocks originating in the United States by implementing significant price adjustments, which in turn affect Europe's relative competitive position. On the theoretical side, our results contribute to the literature by suggesting that the shock insulation property of floating exchange rates extends beyond the two countries that have currencies that are free to move. The transmission of shocks between two countries can also be dampened by the choice of floating exchange rates in a third country. On the practical side, we can extend our results to China, the largest Asian economy. If China did eventually decide to float her currency, Europe's exposure to US shocks would decrease. But, our results also suggest that the overall fall in volatility of Europe's inflation and output, following China's floating, might be modest in size.