There are increasingly many digital alternatives to physical cash as basic means of payment, many of these offered by non-financial private sector actors. While such a trend towards a cashless society brings the convenience of digital payments to users and can encourage innovation in financial...

We study the causal effect of mortgage rate changes on consumer spending, debt repayment, and defaults during an expansionary and a contractionary monetary policy episode in Canada. Our identification takes advantage of the fact that the interest rates of short-term fixed-rate mortgages (the...

In this paper we examine the sensitivity of mortgage arrears for Irish households to changes in mortgage interest rates under a series of plausible monetary policy normalisation scenarios. Using panel data over the period 2004 - 2016 we exploit information on current income and current mortgage...

We use quasi-random access to the Home Affordable Refinance Program (HARP) to identify the causal effect of refinancing a mortgage on borrower balance sheet outcomes. We find that on average, refinancing into a lower-rate mortgage reduced borrowers' default rates on mortgages and nonmortgage...

On December 16th of 2015, the Fed initiated "liftoff", a critical step in the monetary normalization process. We use a unique panel dataset of 640,000 loan-hour observations to measure the impact of liftoff on interest rates, demand, and supply in the online primary market for uncollateralized...

On December 16th of 2015, the Fed initiated “liftoff,” a critical step in the monetary normalization process. We use a unique panel dataset of 640,000 loan-hour observations to measure the impact of liftoff on interest rates, demand, and supply in the online primary market for...

Central banks around the world are examining the possibility of introducing Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). The public’s preferences concerning the usage of CBDC for paying and saving are important determinants of the success of CBDC. Using data from a representative panel of Dutch...

This study analyzes the drivers of the use of formal vs. informal financial services in emerging and developing countries using the 2017 Global FINDEX data. In particular, we investigate whether individuals' choice of financial services correlates with macro-financial and macro-structural...

Financial inclusion means every adult having access to fair and affordable savings, transactional banking, credit and insurance. It also requires consumers of financial services to be literate around their use. Whilst this sounds unobjectionably positive, expanding access to financial products...

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we present an up-to-date assessment of the differences across euro area countries in the distributions of various measures of debt conditional on household characteristics. We consider three different outcomes: the probability of holding debt, the amount...