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...

This study gives an overview of recent innovations in the financing of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Asia. While SMEs are an important contributor to employment and gross domestic product in Asia, they often face significant credit constraints. Recently, in the context of Asia's...

Credit markets around the world are undergoing a deep transformation. Fintech and big tech firms are providing more lending to households and small businesses. A new database estimates that fintech credit flows reached USD 223 billion in 2019, while big tech credit reached USD 572 billion. What...

Before the era of large central bank balance sheets, banks relied on incoming payments to fund outgoing payments in order to conserve scarce liquidity. Even in the era of large central bank balance sheets, rather than funding payments with abundant reserve balances, we show that outgoing...

Fluctuations in the aggregate balance sheets of financial intermediaries provide a window on the joint determination of asset prices and macroeconomic aggregates. We document that financial intermediary balance sheets contain strong predictive power for future excess returns on a broad set of...

What are the welfare effects of enhanced disclosures of public information - Is it always the case, that frequent and timely publication of economic statistics by government agencies and the central bank are desirable - This question has become one of several interlinked strands of debate on the...

We investigate intermediary asset pricing theories empirically and find strong support for models that have intermediary leverage as the relevant state variable. A parsimonious model that uses detrended dealer leverage as a price-of-risk variable, and innovations to dealer leverage as a pricing...

Blockchain technology breathes new life into the classical analysis of money as a substitute for a ledger of all past transactions. While it involves updating the ledger through a decentralized consensus on the unique truth, the robustness of the equilibrium that supports this consensus depends...

We explore the economics and optimal design of "permissioned" distributed ledger technology (DLT) in a credit economy. Designated validators verify transactions and update the ledger at a cost that is derived from a supermajority voting rule, thus giving rise to a public good provision game....

Blockchain technology breathes new life into the classical analysis of money as a substitute for a ledger of all past transactions. While it involves updating the ledger through a decentralized consensus on the unique truth, the robustness of the equilibrium that supports this consensus depends...