Central banks around the world are exploring and in some cases even piloting Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). CBDCs promise to realize a broad range of new capabilities, including direct government disbursements to citizens, frictionless consumer payment and money-transfer systems, and a...

This paper uses a gravity model of migration to analyze how income differentials affect the flow of immigrants into U.S. states using annual data from the American Community Survey. We add to existing literature by decomposing income differentials into short- and long-term components and by...

This paper finds declining consumption expenditure between paydays, for a typical household in the working population of the UK. The magnitude is inconsistent with exponential time preference, but compatible with quasi-hyperbolic discounting. However, the hyperbolic model predicts that credit...

This paper introduces a novel monthly consumption indicator: the IZA / Fable Data consumption indicator for Germany. It is based on credit card transactions data collected and anonymised by Fable Data from 2017 onwards. We study some of the properties of the data and use a so-called "one year...

In models with complete markets, targeting core inflation enables monetary policy to maximize welfare by replicating the flexible price equilibrium. In this paper, we develop a twosector two-good closed economy new Keynesian model to study the optimal choice of price index in markets with...

In closed or open economy models with complete markets, targeting core inflation enables monetary policy to maximize welfare by replicating the flexible price equilibrium. We analyze this result in the context of developing economies, where a large proportion of households are credit constrained...

Leaks are pervasive in politics. Hence, many committees that nominally operate under secrecy de facto operate under the threat that information might be passed on to outsiders. We study theoretically and experimentally how this possibility affects the behavior of committee members and the...

We examine gender differences in career progression and promotions in central banking, a stereotypical male-dominated occupation, using confidential anonymized personnel data from the European Central Bank (ECB) during the period 2003-2017. A wage gap emerges between men and women within a few...

We develop a general equilibrium model that highlights the trade-offs between physical and digital forms of retail central bank money. The key differences between cash and central bank digital currency (CBDC) include transaction efficiency, possibilities for tax evasion, and, potentially,...

We study whether a higher share of immigrant pupils affects the school performance of natives using aggregate multi-country data from PISA. We find evidence of a negative and statistically significant relationship. The size of the estimated effect is small: doubling the share of immigrant pupils...