Despite significant progress in closing the gender gap in earnings, work remains highly gendered, with women continuing to participate less in the workforce, work fewer hours, and face persistent wage disparities. This column examines the evolution of gender studies, highlighting two key academic explanations for the remaining gaps: inherent gender differences and societal constraints. The […]
Central banks are increasingly using public communication to explain monetary policy decisions and help anchor inflation expectations. This column analyses news articles on Federal Open Market Committee decisions between 1994 and 2023 to examine whether the media accurately covers the Committee’s communication, and whether this coverage influences households’ inflation expectations. The authors find that the […]
Effective presentations are critical to academic and professional success, yet many presentations fail to engage or inform effectively. This column explores the impact of providing simple, low-cost advice on presentation quality. Evidence from a randomised controlled trial at a prestigious finance conference shows that a targeted intervention improved presentation effectiveness by roughly the same amount […]
As economies grow, their industrial and geographic distributions of income change. This column explores how regional disparities are intertwined with industrial transformation. It demonstrates how shifts in consumption patterns due to rising incomes enable an industrially and spatially unbalanced growth process, challenging the conventional view that falling transportation costs or exposure to international trade are […]
Teenage drinking remains widespread in Europe. To address concerns about its negative effects on health and cognition, many European countries have raised their minimum legal drinking age from 16 to 18 in recent decades. This column reports on evidence from Spain, where regions increased the minimum age at different times, which shows that the higher […]
Democracies around the world are seeing substantial increases in support for radical populist parties. This column uses a natural experiment in Germany from 2009 to 2014, when high school history curricula alternated between covering the communist German Democratic Republic and Nazi Germany, to examine whether effective history education can reduce the allure of extreme ideologies. […]
The EU depends significantly on third markets for specific products and technologies in the semiconductor industry. This column describes a comprehensive approach to monitor the EU semiconductor ecosystem. Given the intricate nature of the global semiconductor supply chain, disruptions could propagate rapidly and affect multiple players across different countries. A comprehensive understanding of the entire […]
MicroStrategy shares briefly surged on Monday before faltering to end nearly unchanged, after the software company and bitcoin stockpiler was selected to join the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 index, further brightening the prospects of the stock. The $25.7 trillion index that houses the largest non-financial companies will now gain indirect exposure to bitcoin via MicroStrategy, which holds […]
A proposal to oblige the Swiss National Bank (SNB) to hold bitcoin was set in motion in an initiative published by the Swiss federal chancellery on Tuesday. The initiative proposes changing the law to make the Swiss central back hold part of its reserves in gold and bitcoin. Put forward by a group of 10 […]
A U.S. bank regulator told banks to pause dabbling directly in crypto in 2022 and 2023, but did not order them to stop providing banking services to crypto companies contrary to industry complaints of widespread “debanking,” according to documents released on Friday. A judge ordered the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to provide versions of supervisory “pause […]
