London's preeminence as a foreign exchange trading center is of recent vintage. Before World War I, there was little demand for foreign currencies by British banks, firms and investors, which conducted the majority of their cross-border transactions in sterling. Foreign currency transactions...

Scholars and politicians have expressed concern that immigrants from countries with low levels of political trust transfer those attitudes to their destination countries. Using large-scale survey data covering 38 countries and exploiting origin-country variation across different cohorts and...

In these highly uncertain times, flexibility has value.

We ask whether epidemic exposure leads to a shift in financial technology usage and who participates in this shift. We exploit a dataset combining Gallup World Polls and Global Findex surveys for some 250,000 individuals in 140 countries, merging them with information on the incidence of...

This lecture discusses the work by the Estonian economist Ragnar Nurkse (1907-1959). It focuses on the early Nurkse, who was concerned with exchange rates, capital flows and what today we call the international financial architecture. It asks how many of the conclusions of International Currency...

Rising inequality and widespread poverty, social unrest and polarization, gender and ethnic disparities, declining social mobility, economic fragility, unbalanced growth due to technology and globalization, and existential danger from climate change are urgent global concerns of our day. These...

Using hand-collected data spanning more than a decade on European banks' sovereign debt portfolios, we show that the trust of residents of a bank's countries of operation in the residents of a potential target country of investment has a positive, statistically significant, and economically...

Historical experience suggests that network infrastructure can be reoriented and reconstructed relatively quickly in postwar Ukraine, with the central government playing a coordinating role. Repair of the housing stock may take longer, and chronic housing shortages leading to inadequate labor...