Page 2 - Real Effects News Today

Top Gun: Maverick climbs higher on the list of top-grossing domestic films and producer Jerry Bruckheimer is crediting Tom Cruise.

Standard economic models typically ignore the role of the financial system in transmitting exchange rate changes to the real economy. This column uses German data to show that large banks with high net foreign currency asset exposure increase lending to export-intensive firms and – through interbank markets – to small banks without foreign currency asset exposure but with a

Access to finance is a crucial component of economic development. This column studies the effects of Brazil’s ‘Banks for All’ programme, which targeted underbanked cities not served by government-owned banks. It finds a strong positive effect of the policy on the number of bank branches and on the overall amount of credit and deposits, particularly for cities located in

The rapid growth of FinTech platforms creates challenges and opportunities for financial markets. This column uses a new dataset from a Portuguese FinTech platform to study the determinants of lending demand and the consequences of FinTech loans for small and medium-sized enterprises. It finds that FinTech lending caters mainly to larger SMEs, with higher profitability and a

David Andolfatto In the ongoing debate on the design of central bank digital currency (CBDC), several authors have expressed important concerns about financial stability risk. As CBDC would provide depositors with an account at the central bank, they may trigger a run on the banking system. In case of systemic uncertainty about banks, holding risk-free CBDC could indeed become more attractive than bank deposits (Allen et al. 2020, Bindseil and Panetta 2020, Fernández-Villaverde et al. 2020, Ju...

Stephanie Schmitt-Grohe, Martín Uribe After a period of widespread financial instability in the 1980s and 1990s, mostly concentrated among commodity exporters, only a handful of developing countries have been hit by systemic banking crises over the past two decades. Several factors have contributed to this state of affairs, including an extended period of sustained economic growth, financial deepening, and favourable external conditions, most notably a protracted period of stable and high comm...