This paper employs a new and comprehensive database of central bank institutional design to reassess the role of the independence of these public administrations in influencing the macroeconomic performance of countries, before and after the Global Financial Crisis. Using new dynamic indices,...

The article presents a novel dynamic setting to compare old – usury – and new – cryptocurrency – money laundering techniques and uses it for calibration to shed light on their relative role as an effective device for the criminal organizations to clean their illegal revenues. The...

The aim of this paper is to analyze the demand of both traditional and new media of exchange – as cryptocurrencies and central bank digital currencies – proposing a novel specification of the demand for money. In this specification, the medium of payment (MOP) has three properties: the first...

We construct a new dataset on the presence of women on central bank monetary policy committees for a set of 103 countries, over the period 2002-2016. We document an increasing share of women in monetary policy committees, which is mainly associated with a higher overall presence of women in...

This article discusses the relationships between populism, economic policy design and central bank independence (CBI). Assuming that 1) a macro (banking) shock can occur, 2) the incumbent government can face a trade-off between bail-out and bail-in and can finance its public spending choosing...

One sentence summary: Do people see privacy as an attribute of media of payment? In the economic literature, a medium of payment has two properties: liquidity and store of value. The fast and increasing development of digital currencies raises the question: is privacy a third attribute? We test...

This chapter reviews the evolution of the theory of monetary policy design since the 1980s, highlighting the emerging role of central banker psychology. Three subsequent stages are evident. First, the central bank was considered as an independent institution (modern economics). Second, central...

This paper shows how financial inequality and misbeliefs about group entitlements can increase the consensus for populist parties. Given a banking shock, traditional and populist parties propose alternative bailout policies, where short termism characterizes the populistic policy. The citizens...

This paper examines the economy's vulnerability to money laundering in a given region. Assuming that criminals are rational investors who take into account risks and returns of both legal and illegal investments, we define vulnerability as a function of well-identified drivers. Proxies of these...

In advanced economies, the recent collapse of interest rates to the Zero Lower Bound (ZLB) has triggered a series of research questions on how to navigate the new zero-interest credit environment. Focusing on illegal markets, it is possible to explain why usury still remains widespread after the...