One of the main concerns associated with central bank digital currencies (CBDC) is the disintermediating effect on the banking sector in general, and the risk of bank runs in times of crisis in particular. This paper examines the implications of an interest-bearing CBDC on banking crises in a...

We compile biographical information on more than 5,000 Prussian politicians and exploit newly digitized administrative data to examine whether landowning and landless elites differ in the extent to which they support health infrastructure projects. Using exogenous variation in soil texture, we...

We look at the effect of capital rules on a banking system that is connected through correlated credit exposures and interbank lending. The rules, which combine individual bank characteristics and interconnectivity measures of interbank lending, are to minimize a measure of system-wide losses....

This paper re-visits the state of decentralised banking in Germany, Spain and the UK. The cross-country comparison we conducted has identified Germany as having the most decentralised banking system, followed by Spain and the UK, as expected. The development of regional and double-purpose banks,...

Multi-agency financial stability committees (FSCs) have grown dramatically since the global financial crisis. However, most cannot direct actions or recommend to other agencies that they take actions, and most would influence policy actions only through convening and discussing risks. We...

Does the current account improve or deteriorate following a monetary policy expansion? We examine this issue theoretically and empirically. We show that a standard open economy DSGE model predicts that the current account response to a monetary policy shock depends on the degree of economic...

We analyze the effect of the geographic expansion of banks across U.S. states on the co-movement of economic activity between states. Exploiting the removal of interstate banking restrictions to construct time-varying instrumental variables at the state-pair level, we find that bilateral banking...

This paper builds a macro model with a financial sector and a housing market to understand the transmission and effects of macroprudential instruments addressing mortgage credit. The model compares the introduction of a loan-to-value ratio (LTV), a countercyclical capital buffer (CCyB)-style...

Recent empirical work has established that 'democracy causes growth'. In this paper, we determine the underlying institutions which drive this relationship using data from the Varieties of Democracy project. We sketch how incentives and opportunities as well as the distribution of political...

We investigate the long-run effects of government surveillance on civic capital and economic performance, studying the case of the Stasi in East Germany. Exploiting regional variation in the number of spies and administrative features of the system, we combine a border discontinuity design with...