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...

Prices for cryptocurrencies have undergone multiple boom-bust cycles, together with ongoing entry by retail investors. To investigate the drivers of crypto adoption, we assemble a novel database (made available with this paper) on retail use of crypto exchange apps at daily frequency for 95...

The phenomenal growth of cryptocurrencies raises important questions about their footprint on the financial system. What role are traditional financial intermediaries playing in cryptocurrency markets and what drives their engagement? Are new nodes emerging? We help answer these questions by...

Although real integration conceptually plays an important role for the comovement of international equity markets, documenting this link empirically has proven challenging. We construct a new dataset of theory-guided, relevant measures of bilateral trade in final and intermediate goods and...

What are the unequal effects of changes in consumer prices on the cost of living? In the context of changes in import prices (driven by, e.g., changes in trade costs or exchange rates), most analyses focus on variation across households in initial expenditure shares on imported goods. However,...

Is inflation (still) a global phenomenon? We study the international co-movement of inflation based on a dynamic factor model and in a sample spanning up to 56 countries during the 1960-2023 period. Over the entire period, a first global factor explains approximately 58% of the variation in...

Starting with Krugman (1980), much literature has analyzed how trade liberalization affects the economy based on the notion that trade is motivated by consumer's love of variety. In this paper, I augment these preferences by the determinants of demand for heterogeneous products. The model...

While the direct impact of geographic endowments on prosperity is present in all countries, in former colonies, geography has also affected colonization policies and, therefore, institutional outcomes. Using non-colonized countries as a control group, I develop an empirical strategy that...

Why has Swiss export performance been so strong during the past quarters despite the marked appreciation of the CHF? What is the outlook for Swiss exports given the still elevated CHF? In this paper, we shed light on these questions by analyzing a panel of Swiss exports disaggregated along both...

We develop a general equilibrium model of vertical innovation in which multiple firms compete monopolistically in the quality space. The model features many firms, each of which holds the monopoly to produce a unique quality level of an otherwise homogenous good, and consumers who are...