Historically, sovereign debt in local currency has been considered safer than debt in foreign currency. Yet the literature offers scant theoretical or empirical guidance as to why such a gap exists, or why it appears to have slowly and steadily diminished for all regions over the past two...

Since the eurozone crisis, there has been a stark divergence between European banks and Japanese banks in their dollar uses and sources. We show that these shifts have implications for the price of dollar funding. We document a "Japan Repo Premium." Japanese banks pay a premium for repos with US...

After the recent crisis, a reduction was observed in global current account (flow imbalances). Still, global disequilibria as measured in terms of countries' net foreign assets (stock imbalances), kept increasing. This paper studies whether stock imbalances have a stabilizing or destabilizing...

Money is a social convention where one party accepts it as payment in the expectation that others will do so too. Over the ages, various forms of private money have come and gone, giving way to central bank money. The reasons for the resilience of central bank money are of particular interest...

Exchange rate fluctuations influence economic activity not only via the standard trade channel, but also through a financial channel, which operates through the impact of exchange rate fluctuations on borrowers' balance sheets and lenders' risk-taking capacity. This paper explores the...

We develop a model to empirically study the influence of global factors in driving trend inflation and the inflation gap. We apply our model to five established inflation targeters and a group of heterogeneous Asian economies. Our results suggest that while global factors can have a sizeable...

This paper analyses the role of financial development and financial technology in driving inequality in (returns to) wealth. Using micro data from the Survey on Household Income and Wealth (SHIW) conducted by the Bank of Italy for the period 1991-2016, we find evidence of the "Matthew effect" -...

This paper compares the effectiveness of macroprudential policies (MaPs) and capital controls (CCs) in influencing the volume and composition of capital inflows, and the probability of banking and currency crises. We distinguish between foreign exchange (FX)-based MaPs, which may be similar to...

We consider the drivers and implications of the growth of "BigTech" in finance - ie the financial services offerings of technology companies with established presence in the market for digital services. BigTech firms often start with payments. Thereafter, some expand into the provision of...