Digitalization led to a rapid expansion of loyalty tokens typically bundled as part of product price. An open question is whether issuers are incentivized to make loyalty tokens tradable, raising regulation issues for monetary and banking authorities. This paper argues that an issuer earns more...

We present new long-run samples of r-g series over centuries for key economies in the international financial system. Across a wide variety of econometric approaches, and including duration-matched constructions, we demonstrate strong evidence of trend stationarity in these series. Although we...

On the twentieth anniversary of its inception, the euro has yet to expand its role as an international currency. We document this fact with a wide range of indicators including its role as an anchor or reference in exchange rate arrangements--which we argue is a portmanteau measure--and as a...

Can massive online retailers such as Amazon and Alibaba issue digital tokens that potentially compete with bank debit accounts? There is a long history of trading stamps and loyalty points, but new technologies are poised to sharply raise the significance of redeemable assets as a store of...

Debt in emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) is at its highest level in half a century. In about nine out of 10 EMDEs, debt is higher now than it was in 2010 and, in half of the EMDEs, debt is more than 30 percentage points of gross domestic product higher. Historically, elevated...

This paper employs high frequency transactions data on the world's oldest and most extensive centralized peer-to-peer Bitcoin market, which enables trade in the currencies of more than 135 countries. We develop an algorithm that allows, with high probability, the detection of "crypto vehicle...

This paper employs an updated algorithm and database for classifying exchange rate and anchor currency choice, to explore the evolution of the global exchange rate system, including parallel rates, capital controls and reserves. In line with a large recent literature, we find that the dollar has...

China's real estate has been a key engine of its sustained economic expansion. This paper argues, however, that even before the Covid-19 shock, a decades-long housing boom had given rise to severe price misalignments and regional supply-demand mismatches, making an adjustment both necessary and...

Over the 21st century, and especially since 2014, global exchange rate volatility has been trending downwards, notably among the core G3 currencies (dollar, euro and the yen), and to some extent the G4 (including China). This stability continued through the Covid-19 recession to date: unusual,...

Utilizing critical recent data advances, we analyze empirical evidence on long-run samples of short-maturity real interest rates as well as term spreads based on multi-century data. In contrast to an extensive literature on short-maturity real interest rates over the past few decades, we find...