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Finance Banking Education Featured World

Unlocking SME growth: Key lessons from Ecuador’s loan program

Governments and development institutions spend billions to help small businesses access financing, hoping this will create jobs and support inclusive economic growth. But we don’t really know if these programs reach the firms that need help most and help them grow. In a recent paper, we evaluate a loan program in Ecuador implemented by the state […]

Economy Featured Finance News World

How institutions interact with exchange rates after the 2024 US presidential election

Within minutes of the result of the 2024 US presidential election becoming clear, it triggered a global tremor in currency markets. This column investigates how institutional quality shaped currency responses to the election, using high-frequency exchange rate data for 73 countries. Virtually all currencies depreciated against the dollar immediately following the election result, which markets […]

Finance Banking Economy Featured Politics

The financial sector and global dollar system

The current US administration’s approach to financial markets and institutions mixes familiar deregulatory policies with a range of other policies that are largely without precedent. This column, taken from a CEPR book on the economic consequences of the second Trump administration, catalogues the relevant policy shifts that are likely to affect the financial sector and […]

Employment Economy Featured News World

Industrial policy and retaliatory protection under the WTO: Lessons from China

Industrial policy is increasingly implemented worldwide, with many policymakers and researchers highlighting its benefits. However, the cost of industrial policy remains less understood. Using Chinese firm-level data, this column shows that higher industrial subsidies raise the likelihood and severity of foreign anti-dumping and countervailing duties at each investigation stage. These retaliatory tariffs wipe out roughly […]

Finance Banking Featured News World

Chat Bankman-Fried: An experiment on LLM ethics in finance

As large language models gain traction, it is important to ensure that decisions delegated to them comply with ethical and legal principles. This column reports on an experiment in which state-of-the-art large language models were prompted to impersonate the CEO of a fictitious financial firm needing to repay corporate debt urgently with no funds available […]

trade Economy Featured News World

From battlefield to market: How disruptions in Ukraine affected grain price trends

Commodity price spikes at the outset of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine contributed significantly to global inflation in 2022-23, which caught many policymakers off guard in both its intensity and persistence. This column uses a nonstationary competitive storage model to demonstrate that, beyond the temporary surge, the war-induced reduction in Ukraine’s acreage caused an upward […]

Banking Economy Featured Finance News World

The Federal Reserve, the new administration, and the outlook for the economy and monetary policy

The new US administration has made the Federal Reserve’s monetary policymaking more complicated both because of the elevated uncertainty regarding administration policies and because of the extraordinary political pressure put on the central bank. This column describes how, thus far, the Fed has followed a cautious path for policy, waiting for more information on policy […]

Employment Education Featured News World

Information and the labour market

Workers often remain in their jobs even when they know they may get higher wages elsewhere, raising questions about the effectiveness of pay transparency laws. This column draws on a large German survey to examine how information frictions shape labour market outcomes. The findings suggest that workers are better informed than many policymakers assume, but […]

Education Featured News World

When beliefs shape policy outcomes: Lessons from preferential college admissions in Chile

Preferential college admission is gaining traction worldwide as a means to address inequality in higher education, drawing greater attention to the design of such policies. This column analyses a programme for disadvantaged high schools in Chile that offers guaranteed college admission to top-performing students. The programme increased enrolment in selective colleges but reduced pre-college academic […]

Climate Environment Featured Innovation Productivity

Adjusting productivity for carbon emissions: A new perspective on the growth slowdown

Productivity growth has been lacklustre over the past 20 years in most advanced economies. But standard productivity measures ignore the progress that some economies have made in terms of lowering carbon dioxide emissions. This column proposes a method to embed those efficiency gains into existing productivity measures. For traditional (small) estimates of the cost of […]