The Covid-19 pandemic has been a shock to retail payment behaviour. How have the changes differed across countries? What do they imply for the future of cash and digital payments? We assemble a new "Future of Payments" database on retail payment behaviour for up to 95 countries over September...

Does the concept of General Purpose Technologies help explain periods of faster and slower productivity advance in economies? The paper develops a new comparative data set on the usage of electricity in the manufacturing sectors of the USA, Britain, France, Germany and Japan and proceeds to...

Much has been written about 19th century African American and white statures and body mass index values. However, little is known about their physical activity and calories required to sustain height and weight. This paper considers two alternative measures for biological conditions that address...

The definition of inequality is complicated and difficult to assess, and there are various means by which it is evaluated. This study uses the now well-accepted measures of body mass, height, and weight to assess inequality's relationship with current and cumulative net nutrition. Taller...

When traditional measures for income and wealth are scarce or unreliable, alternative values are effective in measuring nutritional conditions during economic development. This study uses net nutrition and calories to illustrate that during the 19th and early 20th centuries that men required...

Alternative measures for material conditions are frequently used to evaluate economic welfare during development. The basal metabolic rate and calories are two alternative net nutrition measures that vary by demographics, nativity, residence, and socioeconomic status. During the 19th and early...

This article develops a model in which an intermediary uses a supply chain finance (SCF) program to fund suppliers. The SCF program pools liquidity from suppliers and meanwhile provides immediate payment to suppliers with pressing liquidity needs. We show that the intermediary optimally selects...

This paper quanti.es the future implications of repayment of bailout loans received by Greece from the EU in the previous decade. These debt obligations amount today to 240 billion euros or 70% of the country’s total public debt and have to be repaid by 2070. This is investigated in a dynamic...

Starting July the 1st 1997, Bulgaria adopted a Currency Board (CB) monetary system. This paper aims at investigating if the adoption of the CB monetary system, which involves the cost of loosing monetary autonomy, has provided a relatively better (with respect to other CEEC) monetary integration...

Should the central bank prevent "excessive" asset price dynamics or should it wait until the boom spontaneously turns into a crash and intervene only afterwards? The debate over this issue goes back at least to the exchange between Bernanke-Gertler (BG) and Cecchetti but has not settled yet. In...