In recent years there has been a growing interest in the impact of inequality on economic growth. Both theoretical and empirical approaches have produced ambiguous results on sign and size of this relationship. Although there is a considerable part of the literature that considers inequality...

In this paper we perform a meta-analysis on empirical estimates of the impact between investment and uncertainty. Since the outcomes of primary studies are largely incomparable with respect to the magnitude of the effect, our analysis focuses on the direction and statistical significance of the...

Global banks use their global balance sheets to respond to local monetary policy. However, sources and uses of funds are often denominated in different currencies. This leads to a foreign exchange (FX) exposure that banks need to hedge. If cross-currency flows are large, the hedging cost...

We propose to pool alternative systemic risk rankings for financial institutions using the method of principal components. The resulting overall ranking is less affected by estimation uncertainty and model risk. We apply our methodology to disentangle the common signal and the idiosyncratic...

We analyze how financial crises affect international financial integration, exploiting euro area proprietary interbank data, crisis and monetary policy shocks, and variation in loan terms to the same borrower on the same day by domestic versus foreign lenders. Crisis shocks reduce the supply of...

We use transaction-level data on foreign exchange (FX) forward contracts for the period 2014 through 2016 in conjunction with supervisory balance sheet information to study the drivers of banks' dollar hedging costs. Comparing contracts of the same maturity that are initiated during the same...

This paper addresses the timing of a location's historical transition from rural to urban activity. We test whether urbanization occurs sooner in places with higher agricultural potential and comparatively lower transport costs, using worldwide data that divide the earth's surface at half-degree...