This paper imagines a world in which countries are on the Bitcoin standard, a monetary system in which all media of exchange are Bitcoin or are backed by it. The paper explores the similarities and differences between the Bitcoin standard and the gold standard and describes the media of exchange...

We study the determinants of borrowers' default in P2P lending with a new data set consisting of 70,673 loan observations from Lending Club. Previous research identified a number of default determining variables but did not distinguish between different loan risk levels. We define four loan risk...

This paper is a first attempt to study the size and development of the shadow economies of 157 countries over 1999 to 2013. Using a MIMIC model, we find that higher tax and regulatory burden, unemployment and self-employment rates are drivers of the shadow economy, meaning that an increase of...

In times of financial distress, central banks provide unlimited liquidity to avoid fire sales. In response, banks raise their demand for collateral assets, and the short-term scarcity of collateral securities leads to higher prices, the Fire Buy premium. To avoid collateral scarcity, central...

This study argues that the ease at which economic agents have access to foreign earnings would influence/increase the level of dollarization in the economy. The three sources of foreign currency earnings are financial integration, trade openness and natural resource rent. As such, we extend the...

Financial dollarization in Sub-Saharan Africa is the most persistent compared to other regions of the world. This study complements the existing scant literature on dollarization in Africa by assessing the role of information sharing offices (public credit registries and private credit bureaus)...

Die Inflation ist derzeit das beherrschende makroökonomische Problem in China. Seit einigen Monaten werden Preissteigerungsraten von mehr als sechs Prozent verzeichnet. Restriktive wirtschaftspolitische Maßnahmen sind bisher weitgehend wirkungslos geblieben. Die Regierung hat inzwischen...

In this paper, an empirically stable money demand model for M3 in the euro area is constructed. Starting with a multivariate system, three cointegrating relationships with economic content are found: (i) the spread between the long- and the short-term nominal interest rates, (ii) the long-term...

Tax collection costs have been advocated in the literature as a reason to deviate from the Friedman rule, in standard general equilibrium monetary models with flexible prices. This paper shows that there are conditions under which the Friedman rule is optimal despite the presence of collection...

In order to assess the importance of monetary and financial developments for key macroeconomic variables in the euro area a money demand system for M3 is estimated adopting a structural cointegrating VAR approach. While maintaining a good statistical representation of the data, long-run...