Over the past few years, the Federal Reserve’s use of unconventional monetary policy tools has received a vast amount of public attention, from discussing how these asset purchases have put downward pressure on longer-term interest rates and thus supported economic activity to evaluating the...

We examine the diffusion of the real-time gross settlement (RTGS) technology across the world's 174 central banks. RTGS reduces settlement risk and facilitates financial innovation in, for example, the settlement of foreign exchange trades. In 1985 only three central banks had implemented RTGS...