We present a ranking of journals geared toward measuring the policy relevance of research. We compute simple impact factors that count only citations made in central bank publications. Our baseline ranking focuses on the period 2014-2023 and examines all items published in the Research Papers in Economics (RePEc) database. This ranking confirms the high policy relevance of journals specializing in macro, monetary, and international economics. Also, the major general interest economic journals are represented reasonably well in this ranking. In contrast, the major finance journals fare somewhat less favorably, with the notable exception of those focused on financial intermediation.

Total Value Locked (TVL) aims to measure the aggregate value of cryptoassets deposited in Decentralized Finance (DeFi) protocols. Although blockchain data is public, the way TVL is computed is not well understood. In practice, its calculation on major TVL aggregators relies on self-reports from community members and lacks standardization, making it difficult to verify published figures independently. We thus conduct a systematic study on 939 DeFi projects deployed in Ethereum. We study the methodologies used to compute TVL, examine factors hindering verifiability, and ultimately propose standardization attempts in the field. We find that 10.5% of the protocols rely on external servers; 68 methods alternative to standard balance queries exist, although their use decreased over time; and 240 equal balance queries are repeated on multiple protocols. These findings indicate limits to verifiability and transparency. We thus introduce ``verifiable Total Value Locked'' (vTVL), a metric measuring the TVL that can be verified relying solely on on-chain data and standard balance queries. A case study on 400 protocols shows that our estimations align with published figures for 46.5% of protocols. Informed by these findings, we discuss design guidelines that could facilitate a more verifiable, standardized, and explainable TVL computation.

Distributed ledgers promise to enable the classical vision of money as a universal transaction record. But is it ever optimal to update a ledger through decentralized consensus? Analyzing an exchange economy with credit, we show that centralized updating is optimal when long-term rewards are more valued, minimizing redundant validation costs and maximizing economic surplus. Decentralization becomes preferable under weaker intertemporal incentives and when validators are drawn from market participants. We show how competing ledgers - anonymous or identified, permissioned or permissionless - can achieve socially optimal outcomes even in low-trust environments. Our framework provides a foundation for designing robust and efficient ledger systems.

Prices for cryptocurrencies have undergone multiple boom-bust cycles, together with ongoing entry by retail investors. To investigate the drivers of crypto adoption, we assemble a novel publicly available database on retail use of crypto exchange apps at daily frequency for 95 countries over 2015–22. We show that a rising Bitcoin price is followed by entry of new users, in particular among more risk-seeking segments of the population. Moreover, we find that when prices rise larger holders sell, likely making a return at retail users’ expense. We confirm these findings by exploiting an exogenous decline in the Bitcoin price during the social unrest in Kazakhstan in early 2022.

Is inflation (still) a global phenomenon? We study the international co-movement of inflation based on a dynamic factor model and in a sample spanning up to 56 countries during the 1960-2023 period. Over the entire period, a first global factor explains approximately 58% of the variation in headline inflation across all countries and over 72% in OECD economies. The explanatory power of global inflation is equally high in a shorter sample spanning the time since 2000. Core inflation is also remarkably global, with 53% of its variation attributable to a first global factor. The explanatory power of a second global factor is lower, except for select emerging economies. Variables such as a broad dollar index, the US federal funds rate, and a measure of commodity prices positively correlate with the first global factor. This global factor is also correlated with US inflation during the 70s, 80s, the GFC, and COVID. However, it lags these variables during the post-COVID period. Country-level integration in global value chains accounts for a significant proportion of the share of both local headline and core inflation dynamics explained by global factors.

Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is a new financial paradigm that leverages distributed ledger technologies to offer services such as lending, investing, or exchanging cryptoassets without relying on traditional centralized intermediaries. A range of DeFi protocols implements these services as a suite of smart contracts, i.e., software programs that encode the logic of conventional financial operations. Instead of transacting with a counterparty, DeFi users interact with software programs that pool the resources of other DeFi users. DeFi’s programmable and automated technology could foster efficiency and increase transparency. However, it exposes users to idiosyncratic risks, such as smart contract vulnerabilities and complex protocol interoperability. This paper provides a deep dive into the overall architecture, the technical primitives, and the financial functionalities of DeFi protocols. We analyze and explain the individual components and how they interact through the lens of a DeFi stack reference (DSR) model featuring three layers: settlement, applications and interfaces. We discuss the technical aspects of each layer of the DSR model. Then, we describe the financial services for the most relevant DeFi categories, i.e., decentralized exchanges, lending protocols, derivatives protocols and aggregators. The latter exploit the property that smart contracts can be “composed,” i.e., utilize the functionalities of other protocols to provide novel financial services. We discuss how composability allows complex financial products to be assembled, which could have applications in the traditional financial industry. We discuss potential sources of systemic risk and conclude by mapping out an agenda for research in this area.

Central banks around the world are researching and developing central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). Yet the motivations for issuance, policy approaches, and technical designs differ across countries. We set out a comprehensive database of CBDC projects and technical approaches, and investigate the economic and institutional factors that correlate with CBDC project efforts. Most projects are found in economies with high mobile phone use and a high capacity for innovation. Work on retail CBDCs is more advanced where the informal economy is larger. Many central banks are considering architectures in which a CBDC is a direct cash-like claim on the central bank, but the private sector handles all retail services.

The Covid-19 pandemic has been a shock to retail payment behaviour. How have the changes differed across countries? What do they imply for the future of cash and digital payments? We assemble a new “Future of Payments” database on retail payment behaviour for up to 95 countries over September 2019 to June 2022. We compare this with measures of the severity of the Covid-19 pandemic, using variation in the timing of waves of cases, changes in mobility and lockdown measures across countries. We find that card-not-present payments, payment app downloads and the volume of cash in circulation all rose in weeks of more stringent lockdowns. Changes were less pronounced in countries with higher mobile penetration. However, recent data suggest that some effects reversed once lockdowns were eased, and mobility rebounded.

Central banks around the world are considering how retail central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) may help to advance financial inclusion. While CBDCs are not a magic bullet, they could be a further tool to promote universal access to payments and other financial services if this goal features prominently in the design from the get-go. In particular, central banks can consider design options to: (1) promote innovation in the two-tiered financial system (eg allowing for non-bank payment service providers); (2) offer a robust and low-cost public sector technological basis (with novel interfaces and offline payments); (3) facilitate enrolment (via simplified due diligence and electronic know-your-customer processes) and data portability; and (4) foster interoperability (both domestically and across borders). Together, these features can address a range of specific barriers to financial inclusion: geographic remoteness, institutional and regulatory factors, economic and market structure issues, characteristics of vulnerability, lack of financial literacy and low trust in existing financial institutions. This paper draws on interviews with nine central banks with advanced work on CBDCs and financial inclusion — the Central Bank of the Bahamas, Bank of Canada, People’s Bank of China, Eastern Caribbean Central Bank, Bank of Ghana, Central Bank of Malaysia, Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, National Bank of Ukraine and Central Bank of Uruguay. It gives concrete examples from the central banks’ work and discusses challenges, risks and regulatory and legal implications. It argues that while CBDCs hold promise for furthering financial inclusion, CBDC issuance may also require new laws and regulations to be enacted, or existing laws to be revised.

What are the unequal effects of changes in consumer prices on the cost of living? In the context of changes in import prices (driven by, e.g., changes in trade costs or exchange rates), most analyses focus on variation across households in initial expenditure shares on imported goods. However, the unequal welfare effects of non-marginal foreign price changes also depend on differences in how consumers substitute between imported and domestic goods, on which there is scant evidence. Using data from Switzerland surrounding the 2015 appreciation of the Swiss franc, we provide evidence that lower-income households have higher price elasticities. We quantify the contribution of heterogeneous elasticities for the unequal welfare effects of observed price changes between 2014–15 and for counterfactual shocks to the mean and dispersion of import price changes.

The phenomenal growth of cryptocurrencies raises important questions about their footprint on the financial system. What role are traditional financial intermediaries playing in cryptocurrency markets and what drives their engagement? Are new nodes emerging? We help answer these questions by leveraging a novel global supervisory database of banks' cryptocurrency exposures and by synthesising a range of complementary data sources for other types of institutions. We find that major banks' exposures currently remain at very modest levels. Across countries, higher innovation capacity, more advanced economic development, and greater financial inclusion are associated with a higher likelihood of banks taking on cryptocurrency exposures. We show that substantial activity is concentrated in lightly regulated crypto exchanges. This "shadow crypto financial system" serves both retail and institutional clients, such as dedicated investment funds. An uneven regulatory treatment across banks and crypto exchanges and significant data gaps suggest that a proactive, holistic and forward-looking approach to regulating and overseeing cryptocurrency markets is needed. It should focus on ensuring a more level playing field with regard to financial services provided by established financial institutions and intermediaries in the emerging crypto shadow financial system by introducing more stringent regulatory and supervisory oversight for the latter.

In just a few years, central banks have rapidly ramped up their research and development efforts on central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). A growing body of economic research informs these activities, often focusing on the “reserves for all” aspect of CBDCs for retail use. However, CBDCs should be considered in the full context of the digital economy and the centrality of data, which raises concerns around competition, payment system integrity, and privacy. This review gives a guided tour of the growing CBDC literature on the microeconomic considerations related to operation architectures, technologies, and privacy as well as the macroeconomic implications for the financial system, financial stability, and monetary policy. A set of questions, particularly on the cross-border dimensions of CBDCs, remains unresolved and calls for further work to expand the research frontier.

Do large firms, product categories, and products affect the inflationary process? In this paper, we show empirically that granularity features are important for understanding retail inflation dynamics in low-inflation environments and international inflation comovement, and we trace along which dimensions it does so. We first develop a methodology to decompose aggregate retail inflation in an unweighted component and granular components for the category, firm and product dimension. After showing the importance of each dimension for price setting at the firm level using a large disaggregated multi-country homescan data set spanning the years 2008 to 2020, we estimate the components and show that granular components contribute significantly to aggregate retail inflation in our data in low-inflation economies. Finally, we study the role of large firms for inflation co-movement across countries: inflation in two countries could be correlated because the same large, multinational firms sell their products in both countries. Our preliminary results show that inflation is more correlated in countries with a higher share of common firms, suggesting that the presence of multinational firms may also help to explain international inflation co-movement.

Although real integration conceptually plays an important role for the comovement of international equity markets, documenting this link empirically has proven challenging. We construct a new dataset of theory-guided, relevant measures of bilateral trade in final and intermediate goods and services. With these measures, we provide evidence of a strong link between changes in international trade – in particular global value chains – and equity market comovement. These results suggest that supply chain disruptions and reshoring, for instance due to political tensions, war, and the COVID-19 crisis, might affect the interconnections between stock markets via rippling through the global production network.

Do targeted macroprudential measures impact non-targeted sectors too? We investigate the compositional changes in the supply of credit by Swiss banks, exploiting their differential exposure to the activation in 2013 of the countercyclical capital buffer (CCyB) which targeted banks’ exposure to residential mortgages. We find that the additional capital requirements resulting from the activation of the CCyB are associated with higher growth in banks’ commercial lending. While banks are lending more to all types of businesses, the new macroprudential policy benefits smaller and riskier businesses the most. However, the interest rates and other costs of obtaining credit for these firms rise as well.

Auer, Cornelli and Frost pulled all of the data together and sorted and analyzed it for their paper "Rise of the central bank digital currencies: drivers, approaches and technologies" (2020). Bowen added the tabs "All Country Data," "Developed Country Data," and "Averaged Data for Speeches" for her own dissertation.

Employing representative data from the U.S. Survey of Consumer Payment Choice, we find no evidence that cryptocurrency investors are motivated by distrust in fiat currencies or regulated finance. Compared with the general population, investors show no differences in their level of security concerns with either cash or commercial banking services. We find that cryptocurrency investors tend to be educated, young and digital natives. In recent years, a gap in ownership of cryptocurrencies across genders has emerged. We examine how investor characteristics vary across cryptocurrencies and show that owners of cryptocurrencies increasingly tend to hold their investment for longer periods.