Financial institutions

This provisional Market Notice sets out the expected design for a new financial stability tool – the Contingent NBFI Repo Facility – that the Bank of England intends to invite applications for later this year. The Bank is expanding its toolkit to intervene where severe liquidity-related dysfunction in gilt markets threatens financial stability, by developing a facility that will allow eligible Non-Bank Financial Institutions (NBFIs) to borrow cash against gilts at times of severe gilt market dysfunction.

We study the importance of information technology (IT) in banking for entrepreneurship. Guided by a parsimonious model, we establish that job creation by young rms is stronger in US counties more exposed to banks with greater IT adoption. We present evidence consistent with banks' IT adoption spurring entrepreneurship through a collateral channel: entrepreneurship increases by more in IT-exposed counties when house prices rise. Further analysis suggests that IT improves banks' ability to determine collateral values, in particular when collateral appraisal is more complex.

Households differ considerably in terms of the inflation they experience at any point in time. The main reasons for this are that prices (and thus price changes) differ from place to place and that households do not all buy the same products. Households adjust their purchases over time, but not enough to offset these differences.

Benjamin Knox and Jakob Ahm SørensenWe develop a theory that connects insurance prices, insurance companies’ investment behavior, and equilibrium asset prices. Consistent with the model’s predictions, we show empirically that (1) insurers with more stable insurance funding take more investment risk and, therefore, earn higher average investment returns; (2) insurers set lower prices on policies when expected investment returns are higher, both in the cross-section of insurance companies and in the time series.