This paper presents a general equilibrium model with endogenous collateral constraints to study the relationship between financial development and business cycle fluctuations in a cross-section of economies with different sizes of their financial sector. The financial sector can amplify or...

This paper documents differences in firm size depending on whether their manager is a man or a woman and studies the aggregate implications of these gender gaps in Chile. We document that in 2007 less than a quarter of firms are managed by women and that this gap takes its largest value for...

This paper studies the aggregate effects of the existing differences between male and female-run firms in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). Using data from the World Bank Enterprise Survey and the International Labor Organization (ILO), we show that only about one-fourth of the total firms...

Should a central bank take over the provision of e-money, a circulable electronic liability? We discuss how e-money technology changes the tradeoff between public and private provision, and the tradeoff between e-money and a central bank's existing liabilities like bank notes and reserves. The...

We present a policy framework for electronic money and payments. The framework poses a set of positive questions related to the areas of responsibility of central banks: payments systems, monetary policy and financial stability. The questions are posed to four broad forms of e-money: privately...

This paper presents four blue-sky ideas for lowering the cost of the Government of Canada's debt without increasing the debt's risk profile. We argue that each idea would improve the secondary-market liquidity of government debt, thereby increasing the demand for government bonds and thus...

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 review the nascent but fast-growing literature on central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), focusing on their potential impacts on private banks. We evaluate these impacts in three areas of traditional banking: payments, lending, and liquidity and maturity transformation. For each area, we...

High-value payment systems (HVPSs) are typically liquidity-intensive because the payment requests are indivisible and settled on a gross basis. Finding the right order in which payments should be processed to maximize the liquidity efficiency of these systems is an NP-hard combinatorial...

In this paper we discuss the competition and innovation arguments for issuing a central bank digital currency (CBDC). A CBDC could be an effective competition policy tool for payments. On innovation, we argue that a CBDC could be necessary to support the vibrancy of the digital economy by...