US households that lack digital means of making and receiving payments cannot participate fully in an increasingly digitized economy. Assessing the scope of this problem and addressing it requires a definition of households that are underserved in digital payments. Traditional definitions of...

We leverage supervisory microdata to uncover the role of global banks' risk limits in driving exchange rate dynamics. Consistent with a model of currency intermediation under risk constraints, shocks to dealers' risk limits lead to price and quantity adjustments in the foreign exchange market....

Our analysis of over 500 Ghanaian firms sheds light, for the first time, on how certain firms managed to extract value from mobile money. Our regressions point to the usefulness of this form of cashless payments in stabilizing sales during the COVID pandemic. Perhaps the most important message...

What are the effects of payout restrictions on bank risk-shifting? To answer this question, we exploit the restriction policies imposed during the Covid-crisis on US banks as a natural experiment. Using a highfrequency differences-in-differences empirical strategy, we show that, when share...

We model how a cyber attack may be amplified through the U.S. financial system, focusing on the wholesale payments network. We estimate that the impairment of any of the five most active U.S. banks will result in significant spillovers to other banks, with 38 percent of the network affected on...

We analyze how systemic cyber risk in the wholesale payments network relates to adverse financial conditions. We show that at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, payment activity increased, became more concentrated, and showed intraday liquidity stress. Cyber vulnerability was elevated in late...

Shocks to banks' ability to raise liquidity at short notice can lead to depositor panics, as evidenced by recent bank failures. Why don't banks take a more active role in managing these risks? In a standard bank-run model, we show that risk management failures are most prevalent when exposures...

U.S. bank holding companies (BHCs) have developed a very significant nonbank footprint over the years, adding thousands of specialty lenders, brokers and dealers, asset management, and insurance subsidiaries to their organizations. These nonbank subsidiaries represent a sizeable share of...