Central banks

Oliver Pfäuti and Edson WuHow do high public debt and fiscal uncertainty interact to shape inflation? We develop a model in which firms face uncertainty about both marginal costs and fiscal policy and choose how much information to acquire before setting prices. Higher debt raises steady-state taxes, affecting attention through two opposing forces. While these taxes reduce the profit stakes of mispricing, they make desired prices more sensitive to tax fluctuations, increasing the value of information.

Fiscal integration in a currency union is generally understood as a transfer from fiscally strong to fiscally weak countries. I show that this changes when common debt is paired with a non-defaultable common tax, even if national debt remains defaultable. The risky country gains from intertemporal trade: it receives a grant financed by a perpetual obligation it discounts more heavily than lenders do. The cost to the safe member is second-order and the tax removes it by insuring imperfectly correlated cycles rather than transferring resources in expectation.

The impact of private equity buyouts on target firms is well documented, yet empirical evidence on the impact of buyouts across the supply chain remains scarce. We address this gap by using unique production network data to examine how supply chains contribute to the ability of private equity investors to create and extract value. We show that, on average, suppliers of firms backed by private equity outperform their peers because of increased demand for inputs from customers backed by private equity – rather than alternative mechanisms such as knowledge spillovers.

The Bank of England provides the Secretariat to the London Foreign Exchange Joint Standing Committee (FXJSC) Legal Sub-Committee. The FXJSC is made up of market participants, infrastructure providers and the UK financial regulators.