The first global cryptocurrency benchmarking study presents a systematic and comprehensive picture of a rapidly evolving industry, illustrating how cryptocurrencies are being used, stored, transacted and mined. The study gathered non-public data from more than 100 cryptocurrency companies and...

A disagreement has emerged over whether advanced countries such as Britain engaged in financial repression following the Second World War. A review of the historical and archival evidence identifies eleven pieces of British legislation and sixteen directives that supported financial repression...

While fixed exchange rates were implemented during and after the Second World War, trading of national currencies at free market rates continued in Switzerland and New York. This paper analyses new daily time series data from these two markets for three currencies: British pound sterling...

This paper examines UK sovereign debt sustainability following the Second World War. Even though the UK in 1946 recorded the highest public debt-to-GDP ratio of the 20th century, the sovereign credit literature does not show a UK sovereign default following the Second World War. New archival...

Sovereign debt crises are harmful reoccurring economic phenomena and the subject of how best to achieve sovereign debt sustainability is therefore of paramount importance. For decades economists have struggled to find a robust and consistent means of assessing sovereign debt sustainability. This...

The Bitcoin Market Potential Index conceptualizes and ranks the potential utility of bitcoin across 178 countries to show where the cryptocurrency has the greatest relative potential for adoption. The index utilizes a data set with 40 variables from the following areas: technology penetration,...

This paper surveys the sovereign debt literature and summarizes the political economy trade-offs of seven distinct mechanisms for achieving debt sustainability. Two mechanisms – financial aid and asset exchange – are often underemphasized or entirely overlooked even though they can play an...

Alternative currencies have appeared regularly for at least the last half-millennia, often arising out of similar socio-economic circumstances and ceasing to circulate within a relatively short time period. While regulatory shifts and technology shocks account for some of the challenges...

The report presents new insights and data on stablecoins, an innovative and rapidly evolving sector of the cryptocurrency ecosystem. Stablecoins, as the name suggests, are cryptocurrencies that are designed to minimize price volatility. The findings in this research study are based on the...