The studies on monetary policy highlight that a contractionary policy reduces a firm's access to external funds. However, it is unknown whether it affects men and women equally. In this scenario, the aim of this paper is twofold. First, to investigate the differential effect of monetary policy...

This paper presents some of the historical background to the question, What is the fair price to pay for the use of someone else's money? It identifies weaknesses in the arguments that have been used to justify the regulation of interest rates by the political or religious authorities. It argues...

This paper surveys the economic literature on the scaling-up of aid to Africa. It provides a checklist of issues that need to be considered when preparing a long term macroeconomic projection for a country involving the assumption of a significant increase in aid. Such scaling-up scenarios are...

Using data from the United States, Japan, Germany , United Kingdom and France, Sims (1992) found that positive innovations to short term interest rates led to sharp, persistent increases in the price level. The result was confirmed by other authors and, as a consequence of its non-expectable...

We study the macroeconomic effects of the COVID-19 epidemic in a quantitative dynamic general equilibrium setup with nominal rigidities. We evaluate various containment policies and show that they allow to dramatically reduce the welfare cost of the disease. Then we investigate the role that...

This paper calculates the cost of an unemployment shock in terms of family welfare for married and single families separately and by education level. We find that, overall, families face an average annualized expected dollar equivalent welfare loss of $1,156 when the unemployment rate rises by 1...

We construct a new dataset on the presence of women on central bank monetary policy committees for a set of 103 countries, over the period 2002-2016. We document an increasing share of women in monetary policy committees, which is mainly associated with a higher overall presence of women in...

This paper analyses the gender representation in monetary policy committees, offering three contributions. We propose the first index to evaluate the gender representation in monetary policymaking – i.e. the GMP Index – for a sample of 112 countries as of 2015. Second, we investigate the...

This paper provides the first systematic analysis of the evolution of female and male appointments to central bank boards. We build a novel and unique dataset that tracks appointments and replacements in a balanced panel of 26 OECD central bank boards from 2003 to 2015. We find that the...

We use US household survey data from 2001-2017 to investigate whether monetary policy has heterogeneous effects on women's and men's financial portfolio decisions by analyzing their equity investment. On the one hand, monetary policy significantly affects the entry decisions of women, but not of...