DOI: 10.26466/opusjsr.1981143 ISSN: 2791-9781

Household cost pressure, interest rate hikes, and trust in government

Aytuğ Zekeriya Bolcan
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This study examines associations between household cost pressures, monetary tightening, and trust in government in England during 2022-2023. It links repeated cross-sectional TrustTracker data from 17 monthly environments (8894 number of observations) to official ONS Household Costs Indices (HCIs), CPI inflation, and the Bank of England's month-end Bank Rate. The reconstructed design uses the all-households HCI, an official income-decile HCI spread, and an official mortgagor HCI premium as separate quantities; it does not assign a joint income-by-tenure HCI or construct a respondent-specific exposure gap. Models distinguish between-month specifications for monthly main effects from month-fixed-effect specifications for within-month group differentials. Inference uses exact null-imposed WCR-S/WCR31 wild-cluster tests over all 2^{17} Rademacher sign vectors, test-inverted confidence intervals, and Holm adjustment for four pre-specified heterogeneity tests. Under the registered decision rules, none of the four hypotheses is supported. The unrestricted HCI-CPI comparison is imprecise under severe collinearity; the positive Hike estimate does not meet the 5 per cent decision threshold; no mortgage-related interaction is supported; the negative low-income x Hike differential is exploratory because it does not survive Holm correction; and the crisis-minus-stabilization contrast has weak effective monthly support. A constrained aggregate HCI-CPI differential is reported only as a method-sensitive secondary result. The measurement and small-cluster inference corrections materially change the earlier substantive conclusions. The paper's contribution is therefore to demonstrate a transparent, reproducible use of distribution-sensitive official cost measures and to document the inferential limits of a 17-month mixed micro-macro design.

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