How does house price indexation affect the valuation of equity release mortgages?

Craig Turnbull

Equity Release Mortgages (ERMs) are different from traditional mortgages. Both mortgages provide an upfront cash lump sum. But traditional mortgages are tied to an immediate home purchase that is repaid over a set period, while equity release mortgages are tied to a share of a future home sale. In this blog post, I examine some of the challenges with valuing equity release mortgages. Specifically, I focus on the approaches used to estimate the current home value – a key input to the mortgage valuation – which typically involves applying a simple house price index return to the most recent house survey valuation or transaction price. I show this widespread approach may understate equity release mortgage risks and overstate portfolio values.

Continue reading →

Gender imbalance in economics: what next?

Misa Tanaka

This post by Misa Tanaka is based on her talk at the Royal Economic Society’s webinar on Gender Imbalance in UK Economics which took place on 6 October. She is Head of Research at the Bank of England and a member of the Royal Economic Society’s Women’s Committee.

The latest report on the Gender Imbalance in UK Economics by the Royal Economic Society (RES) Women’s Committee makes a depressing read. In a nutshell, little if any progress has been made in women’s representation in academic economics in the past decade. A well-considered action plan is needed to improve gender balance and diversity in the discipline, if the next decade is to look any different.

Continue reading →

Challenges to monetary policy: lessons from Medieval Europe

Nathan Sussman

The Bank of England co-organised a ‘History and Policy Making Conference‘ in late 2020. This guest post by Nathan Sussman, Professor of International Economics at the Graduate Institute of Geneva, is based on material included in his conference presentation.

Continue reading →

From Pillar 2 to post: is it time for a change in concentration risk methodology?

Chris Leaney

The Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) is a measure of diversification, commonly used as an indicator to calculate banks’ credit concentration risk capital requirements (where credit concentration risk is potential losses from undiversified portfolios). According to BCBS (2019) HHI is employed by c. 50% of regulators, including the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) since 2016. However, despite some evidence that the data-light, easy-to-implement HHI produces broadly comparable outcomes with formal models (eg Bundesbank (2006)), such evidence is limited to large banks or theoretical datasets. In this post I examine the relationship between HHI and a formal model of sector and geographical concentration risk. I show that, for a wide sample of bank sizes, HHI is poorly correlated with the model outputs for both risk types.

Continue reading →

Pinning the tail on the economy: why domestic developments aren’t enough

Simon Lloyd and Ed Manuel

Central banks don’t just care about what is expected to happen. They also care about what could happen if things turn out worse than expected. In line with this, an emerging literature has developed models for measuring and predicting overall levels of macroeconomic risk. This body of work has focused on estimating the level of ‘tail risk‘ in a country by monitoring a range of domestic developments. But this misses a key part of the picture. In a recent Staff Working Paper, we show that monitoring developments abroad is as important as monitoring developments at home when assessing the vulnerability of the economy to a severe downturn.

Continue reading →

I need a dollar, dollar, a dollar is what I need

Ambrogio Cesa-Bianchi and Fernando Eguren-Martin

In March 2020, the Covid-19 (Covid) outbreak turned the world upside down. With economies virtually shut, financial markets were an exception and remained open. However, it was not business as usual for them: the increased need to meet immediate obligations, and a more generalised increase in risk aversion, led investors to liquidate positions in favour of hard old cash. In a recent Staff Working Paper we pose that investors did not seek any type of cash but rather that the world witnessed a ‘dash for dollars’. We show that the resulting race for dollars went beyond exchange rate markets and led to selling pressure on dollar bonds in corporate bond markets, which experienced particularly large increases in spreads.

Continue reading →

Weighed down by debt? Revisiting the link between corporate debt overhang and investment

Bruno Albuquerque

Prior to the Covid-19 (Covid) shock hitting the world economy in March 2020, concerns about US corporate debt sustainability were on the radar of the media and policymakers. Corporates had been accumulating debt at a rapid pace, leading to a record-high debt level of 47% of GDP in 2019. To what extent may the accumulation of debt amplify the ongoing crisis, and delay the US recovery? And what can we learn from past episodes of firm-specific debt booms? In a new paper, I revisit these questions using data for a large panel of US firms from the mid-1980s to just before the pandemic. I find that persistent debt booms led financially constrained firms to cut back on investment, across both capital expenditures and intangible assets.

Continue reading →

Battle of the exchange funds

Max Harris

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.

When Britain created the Exchange Equalisation Account (EEA) in 1932, its designers had little sense of the controversy that would ensue. The previous year, Britain had suspended gold convertibility, and the volatile capital flows that followed convinced officials that they needed a tool for managing the exchange rate. The EEA – originally a fund solely for foreign exchange interventions (its remit is broader now) – seemed not only necessary but eminently reasonable. To a world in the throes of depression, however, it looked like a means to weaken sterling and reap a competitive advantage. America responded by establishing the Exchange Stabilization Fund (ESF) in what many viewed as another escalation in the conflict that was tearing the international monetary system apart.

Continue reading →

Central banks and history: a troubled relationship

Barry Eichengreen

The Bank of England co-organised a ‘History and Policy Making Conference‘ in late 2020. This guest post by Barry Eichengreen, Professor of Economics and Political Science at the University of California Berkley, is based on material included in his keynote address at the conference.

Learning from history is hard. At central banks, it can be hard to draw policymakers’ attention to historical evidence. Even when historical analogies are at the forefront of their minds, the right analogies are not always applied in the right way. In fact, over-reliance on a small number of compelling historical case studies can lead to suboptimal decisions. Policymakers therefore need access to a wide portfolio of analogies. They must also cultivate an historical sensibility that is suspicious of simplification and alert to the differences – as well as the similarities – between ‘now’ and ‘then’.

Continue reading →

Can sectoral supply shocks have aggregate demand consequences?

Ambrogio Cesa-Bianchi and Andrea Ferrero

Restrictions on activity to curb the spread of Covid-19 led to a shutdown of specific parts of the economy. These lockdown measures can be thought of as a shock that suddenly decreases the supply of affected sectors, which lowers output and increases their price. Guerrieri et al (2020) propose a theoretical model of ‘Keynesian supply shocks’ where a sectoral supply shock triggers knock-on effects on demand in other sectors which, if strong enough, can lead to a fall in aggregate prices and output – thus resembling an aggregate demand shock. In a recent paper, we provide empirical evidence supporting this hypothesis using pre-Covid data. Our results suggest a different way to look at the Covid crisis and business cycles in general.

Continue reading →