International standards have the potential to both promote and hinder international trade. Yet empirical scholarship on the standards-trade relationship has been held up due to some methodological challenges: measurement problems, varied effects, and endogeneity concerns. We are able to surmount...

As Canada continues to engage in a dialogue to develop the approach to modernizing its core payment systems, we analyze the core payment systems that exist in countries around the world. We study payment systems in 27 jurisdictions, encompassing a broad range of geographic regions, through three...

We study the effects of competition on loan rates and portfolio-at-risk in microcredit markets using a new database from rating agencies, covering 379 microbanks located in 67 countries between 2002 and 2008. Our study reveals different competitive effects in nonprofit and for-profit microbanks....

We study the dynamics of usage intensity of second-generation cellular telephony over the diffusion curve. Specifically, we address two questions: First, can we draw conclusions about the underlying drivers of technology diffusion by studying usage intensity? Second, what is the effect of high...

We investigate the risks and opportunities to the mandates of central banks arising from fintech developments. Fintech may affect the different areas of responsibility of central banks - mainly monetary policy and financial stability - by changing money demand and by changing the industrial...

We outline a three-step framework to investigate stablecoin arrangements and quantitatively assess their risk. The first step is to classify the stablecoin arrangement into three parts-coin structure, transfer system(s) and financial service(s) - and categorize the attributes of each part. The...

This paper presents OVer, a framework designed to automatically analyze the behaviour of decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols when subjected to a "skewed" oracle input. OVer firstly performs a symbolic analysis on the given contract and constructs a model of constraints. Then, the framework...