Counterfeit money is the topic of television, movies, and lore but hardly seen by most of us - for only about one in ten thousand notes is found to be counterfeit, annually, in the USA (Judson and Porter 2003). And while the value of globally seized and passed counterfeit American dollars has...

In advanced economies, the recent collapse of interest rates to the Zero Lower Bound (ZLB) has triggered a series of research questions on how to navigate the new zero-interest credit environment. Focusing on illegal markets, it is possible to explain why usury still remains widespread after the...

Corporate and securities laws are seen to mitigate corporate fraud by 'manipulating the incentives of agents': presenting corporate agents with a probability of being caught and punished if they commit fraud. This article suggests that the same laws also affect corporate fraud in a significant...

Using 136 United States macroeconomic indicators from 1973 to 2017, and a factor augmented vector autoregression (FAVAR) framework with sign restrictions, we investigate the effects of three structural macroeconomic shocks - monetary, demand, and supply - on the labour market outcomes of black...

This paper analyzes the performance of the monthly economic policy uncertainty (EPU) index in predicting recessionary regimes of the (quarterly) U.S. GDP. In this regard, the authors apply a mixed-frequency Markov-switching vector autoregressive (MF-MSVAR) model, and compare its in-sample and...

The paper investigates exchange rate cycles and their relationship to the business cycle in 7 major emerging market economies. We document the presence of periodic cycles in nominal US-dollar exchange rates and show that these are closely aligned with cycle frequencies in real output. Joint...

What are the economic implications of financial and uncertainty shocks? We show that financial shocks cause a decline in output and goods prices, while uncertainty shocks cause a decline in output and an increase in goods prices. In response to uncertainty shocks, firms increase their markups,...

We use nonlinear empirical methods to uncover non-linearities in the propagation of monetary policy shocks. We find that the transmission on output, goods prices and asset prices is stronger in a low growth regime, contrary to the findings of Tenreyro and Thwaites (2016). The impact is stronger...

This paper studies the implications of money laundering for the optimal design of central bank digital currency (CBDC). I build a general equilibrium framework to explicitly allow money laundering by agents and income audits by a government. I find that as long as CBDC offers less anonymity than...

We propose a monetary model in which the unemployed satisfy the official US definition of unemployment: they are people without jobs who are (i) currently making concrete efforts to find work and (ii) willing and able to work. In addition, our model has the property that people searching for...