Monetary policy in a low (or negative) interest rates environment with a focus on bank heterogeneity: theory and evidence

The main objective of this project is to advance theory and use of "big data" to obtain a better
understanding of monetary policy transmission via the banking system, especially in a low
interest rate environment. The UK, like many advanced economies, have remained, since the
financial crisis a decade ago, in a prolonged period of low interest rates, despite strong monetary
stimulus by central banks. This raises the question whether further lowering of policy rates is
beneficial for macroeconomic outcomes, a question that cannot be answered by traditional
macroeconomic approaches.
With this project, we want to address this issue with two novel approaches: 1) by developing new
models that can capture relevant heterogeneity and nonlinearities; and 2) by exploiting big data
from the UK financial sector and high-frequency monetary policy identification to develop new
and different approaches to empirically analyse the transmission of monetary policy in a low
interest rate environment.