UK QE reconsidered: the real economy effects of monetary policy in the UK, 1990-2012 – an empirical analysis

Empirical studies of so called ‘unconventional’ monetary policy – ‘Quantitative Easing’ or ‘Large Scale Asset Purchases’ - since the North Atlantic Financial Crisis of 2007-2009 in the United Kingdom and elsewhere have mainly focussed on the effect of policy on intermediate variables rather than the stated ultimate goal of such policies, boosting nominal demand and GDP growth. Secondly and relatedly they tend to focus on the crisis and post-crisis period, a time of extraordinary economic and financial dislocation, which creates counterfactual and attribution problems and fails to capture typical macroeconomic lag dynamics. Adopting the approach of Voutsinas and Werner (2010), and building on Lyonnet and Werner’s (2012) study of UK QE, this paper addresses these weaknesses by 1) examining the impact of various different monetary policy instruments (including Quantitative Easing) directly on UK nominal GDP growth; and 2) using a quarterly time series beginning in the first quarter of 1990 and up to the last quarter of 2012 (92 observations in total). We use the Hendry ‘general-to-specific’ econometric methodology to estimate a parsimonious model. The results show that disaggregated bank credit to the real economy (households and firms) has the most significant impact on nominal GDP growth. Changes to the central bank’s interest rate, central bank reserves, and total central bank asset ratios drop out of the model as insignificant. The policy implication it that, as private banks continue to shrink their balance sheets in the UK and Europe following the North Atlantic Crisis of 2008, central banks might wish to consider ‘unconventional’ monetary policies that more directly boost credit to the real economy and thus nominal GDP growt

Quality Enhancement Themes: the First Year Experience. Curriculum Design for the First Year

This report outlines the work and outcomes of a practice-focused development project 'Curriculum design for the first year'. The project was one of nine funded by the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA) under the First-Year Experience Enhancement Theme of the Scottish quality enhancement agenda. The stages of this curriculum design project included: completing a literature review; running staff workshops to gather and disseminate information; holding student focus groups to gather students, views and experiences of the curriculum; collecting case studies of interest to the sector; and reporting findings to the sector. Key findings from the literature are presented in this report. They include the need to adopt student-centred active learning strategies (Harvey, Drew and Smith, 2006; Oliver-Hoyo and Allen, 2005; Barefoot, 2002) and the importance of providing early formative feedback to students (Davidson and Young, 2005; Barefoot, 2002). Many suggestions for improving learning and teaching strategies have been adopted at module level, but could be implemented strategically across the breadth of a programme curriculum. Kift and Nelson (2005) supported this view and argued that it is equally important to support these principles with systemic university-wide change, including administrative and support programmes that are also integrated with the curriculum and student needs

Working out a common task: design and evaluation of user-intelligent system collaboration

This paper describes the design and user evaluation of an intelligent user interface intended to mediate between users and an Adaptive Information Extraction (AIE) system. The design goal was to support a synergistic and cooperative work. Laboratory tests showed the approach was efficient and effective; focus groups were run to assess its ease of use. Logs, user satisfaction questionnaires, and interviews were exploited to investigate the interaction experience. We found that user’ attitude is mainly hierarchical with the user wishing to control and check the system’s initiatives. However when confidence in the system capabilities rises, a more cooperative interaction is adopted

Aiming higher : the Plymouth and Peninsula Tri-Level Model (PPM) for school/HE links : putting the university into school and community

"This report outlines an innovative, effective model of school/higher education (HE) liaison, the Plymouth & Peninsula Model (PPM). The PPM is of major national and international importance. The defining quality of PPM is that it is a genuine partnership, with parity of esteem between HEIs, schools and local authorities (LAs), supported by other major stakeholders. The PPM is based upon firm research evidence, is highly cost effective and could be rolled out nationally to cover geographically all primary and secondary schools and college grouped in consortia" - page iii