Household debt and consumption revisited

Philip Bunn and May Rostom

The academic literature finds that the build-up of household debt before the 2008 financial crisis is linked to weaker consumption afterwards. But there is wider debate over the mechanisms at play. One strand of literature emphasises debt overhang acting through the level of leverage. Others find it was over-optimism acting through leverage growth. In this post, we revisit our previous analysis on leverage and consumption in the UK using synthetic cohort analysis. The correlation between leverage measures and their link to other macroeconomic variables mean it’s challenging to tease out their effects. Yet we find that whilst both mechanisms played a role, there is evidence that debt overhang linked to a tighter credit constraints was the bigger driver.

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Monetary policy, sectoral comovement and the credit channel

Federico Di Pace and Christoph Görtz

There is ample evidence that a monetary policy tightening triggers a decline in consumer price inflation and a simultaneous contraction in investment and consumption (eg Erceg and Levin (2006) and Monacelli (2009)). However, in a standard two-sector New Keynesian model, consumption falls while investment increases in response to a monetary policy tightening. In a new paper, we propose a solution to this problem, known as the ‘comovement puzzle’. Guided by new empirical evidence on the relevance of frictions in credit provision, we show that adding these frictions to the standard model resolves the comovement puzzle. This has important policy implications because the degree of comovement between consumption and investment matters for the effectiveness of monetary policy.

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Do large and small banks need different prudential rules?

Austen Saunders and Matthew Willison

Banks come in different shapes and sizes. Do prudential regulations that work well for big banks work as well for small ones? To help us find out, we measure the effectiveness of some key regulatory ratios as predictors of bank failure. We do so using ‘receiver operating characteristic’ – or ‘ROC’ – analysis of simple threshold rules. When we do this, we find that we can use the ratios we test to make better predictions for large banks than for small ones. This provides evidence that an efficient set of regulations for large banks might not be as efficient for small ones.

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Slow recoveries, endogenous growth and macroprudential policy

Dario Bonciani, David Gauthier and Derrick Kanngiesser

Following the global financial crisis in 2008, central banks around the world introduced tighter banking regulations to increase the resilience of the financial sector and reduce the risks of severe financial disruptions during economic downturns. This fact has motivated a large body of literature to assess the role that macroprudential (MacroPru) policies play in mitigating the severity of recessions. One common finding is that the benefits of MacroPru are relatively minor within standard dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models. In a new paper, we show that MacroPru becomes significantly more important in a model that accounts for the long-term negative consequences of financial disruptions.

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Does corporate leverage amplify economic downturns? A dive into the literature

Sudipto Karmakar, Alexandra Varadi and Sarah Venables

This post reviews the literature on the consequences of debt for corporate and macroeconomic outcomes, drawing both on the pandemic period and on previous financial crises. Lessons from previous crises show that high leverage can amplify corporate risks and economic downturns by: increasing reliance on external financing that may dry up in stress; through debt overhang problems; or by increasing linkages between corporates and other sectors of the economy. Corporate debt may also be correlated with negative outcomes in the pandemic as well, but it is still early to draw direct conclusions.

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What do two million accounts tell us about the impact of Covid-19 on small businesses?

James Hurley, Sudipto Karmakar, Elena Markoska, Eryk Walczak and Danny Walker

This post is the second of a series of posts about the Covid-19 pandemic and its impact on business activity.

Covid-19 led to a sharp reduction in economic activity in the UK. As the shock was playing out, small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) were expected to be more exposed than larger businesses. But until now, we have not had the data to analyse the impact on SMEs. In a recent Staff Working Paper we use a new data set containing monthly information on the current accounts of two million UK SMEs. We show that the average SME saw a very large drop in turnover growth and that the crisis played out very differently for different types of SMEs. The youngest SMEs in consumer-facing sectors in Scotland and London were hit hardest.

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On the origin of systemic risk

Giovanni Covi, Mattia Montagna and Gabriele Torri

Systemic risk in the bank sector is often associated with long periods of economic downturn and large social costs. In a new paper, we develop a microstructural contagion model to disentangle and quantify the different sources of systemic risk for the euro-area banking system. Calibrated to granular euro-area data, we estimate that the probability of a systemic banking crisis was around 3.6% in 2018. Seventy per cent of the risk stems from economic risks, with fire sales and contagion risk accounting for most of the remainder and only a small role for interbank exposures. Our findings suggest that correlations among banks’ losses play a crucial role in the origins of systemic risk.

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Unemployment risk, liquidity traps and monetary policy

Dario Bonciani and Joonseok Oh

The Global Financial Crisis in 2008 caused a significant and persistent increase in unemployment rates across major advanced economies. The worsening in labour market conditions increased uncertainty about job prospects, which potentially gave rise to precautionary savings, putting further downward pressure on real economic activity and prices. Moreover, in response to the severe drop in demand, central banks worldwide cut short-term nominal interest rates, which rapidly approached the zero lower bound (ZLB), where they remained for a prolonged time. In a recent paper, we show that committing to keep the interest rate at zero longer than implied by current macroeconomic conditions is particularly effective at easing contractions in demand in the presence of countercyclical unemployment risk and low interest rates.

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What types of businesses have used government support during the Covid-19 pandemic?

Will Banks, Sudipto Karmakar and Danny Walker

This post is the first of a series of posts about the Covid-19 pandemic and its impact on business activity.

During the pandemic, UK businesses have received unprecedented levels of government support, set to total 9% of GDP. This has mainly been through the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS), under which 1 in 3 employees have been furloughed, and the government-guaranteed loan schemes that were used by 1 in 4 businesses. Despite the scale of this support, little has been said about which businesses received it. In this post we combine data on loan scheme and CJRS usage with a data set on the characteristics of businesses. We find that small, relatively old and sophisticated, labour-intensive businesses in the sectors most vulnerable to the impacts of the pandemic are most likely to have received both types of support.

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Covid-19 briefing: working from home and worker productivity

John Lewis, Andrea Šiško and Misa Tanaka

The Covid pandemic has led to a large enforced shift towards working from home (WFH) as a result of ‘stay-at-home’ policies in many countries. This led to a resurgence in interest in, and new reignited discussion about, the consequences of greater WFH. In this briefing we review the literature on the impact of WFH on productivity. Across a very diverse literature the key lessons are: impacts depend on the nature of tasks, the share of WFH matters, and there is big difference between enforced versus voluntary WFH. And the caveats are important too: cost savings at the firm level don’t automatically translate into economy-wide productivity gains and evidence on long-run effects remains very scarce.

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