Covid-19 briefing: extensions to the SIR model

John Lewis

The SIR model, first developed by Kermack and McKendrick (1927), remains the canonical epidemiological model. It a natural choice for economists seeking to model the interplay between economic and epidemiological dynamics. This briefing surveys some of the many adaptations to the basic SIR setup which have emerged in the epi-macro literature over the past six months. These have all been used to analyse issues such as lockdown policies, super-spreaders, herd immunity, hospital capacity and ‘test- and-trace’.

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Separating deposit-taking from investment banking: new evidence on an old question

Matthieu Chavaz and David Elliott

On 16 June 1933, as the nationwide banking crisis was reaching a new peak, freshly elected US President Franklin D. Roosevelt put his signature at the bottom of a 37-page document: the Glass-Steagall Act. Eight decades later, the debate still rages on: should retail and investment banking be separated, as Glass-Steagall required? In a recent paper, we shed new light on the consequences of this type of regulation by examining the recent UK ‘ring-fencing’ legislation. We show that ring-fencing has an important impact on banking groups’ funding structures, and find that this incentivises banks to rebalance their activities towards retail mortgage lending and away from capital markets, with important knock-on effects for competition and risk-taking across the wider banking system.

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When bigger isn’t better: UK firms’ equity price performance during the Covid-19 pandemic

Tommaso Aquilante, David Bholat, Andreas Joseph, Riccardo M Masolo, Tim Munday and David van Dijcke

Background

Covid-19 (Covid) has had heterogeneous effects on different groups of people. For example, it’s had larger negative impacts on contact-intense occupations (Leibovici, Santacreu and Famiglietti (2020)), low wage earners (Joyce and Xu (2020)) and low-income households (Surico, Känzig and Hacioglu (2020) and Chetty et al (2020)). In this blog, we show that UK listed firms have been heterogeneously impacted too (compare Hassan et al (2020); Griffith, Levell and Stroud (2020)). Surprisingly, small firms’ stock prices have been more resilient on average. Or, to put it differently, being bigger hasn’t been better for firms during the pandemic. However, being big with a modern tilt towards intangibles turned out to be beneficial too.

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Covid-19 briefing: monetary policy strategy post-Covid

Richard Harrison, Kate Reinold and Rana Sajedi

The Covid shock has created substantial and unprecedented challenges for monetary policymakers. This post summarises the key literature on the immediate monetary policy response to the shock, including both tools and short to medium-term strategy issues (but leaving aside the longer-term question of fiscal-monetary interactions).

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Montagu Norman and the transformation of the Bank

Chris Swinson

This post contributes to our occasional series of guest posts by external researchers who have used the Bank of England’s archives for their work on subjects outside traditional central banking topics.

In 1944, the Bank of England’s historian, John Clapham, looked back at the ways in which the Bank had changed since 1914 and remarked:

‘ . . . it would not be fantastic to argue that the Bank in 1944 was further . . . from 1914 than 1914 was from 1714.’

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Covid-19 briefing: Covid-19 crisis, climate change and green recovery

Misa Tanaka

The Coronavirus pandemic and measures to contain contagion had far reaching consequences on economic activities, which also led to a sharp fall in CO₂ emissions. This has sparked new debate about how the recovery from the crisis could be made compatible with the Paris climate goals. In this post, I survey the emerging literature on the link between the economic recovery from the aftermath of the pandemic and climate change.

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