Financial institutions

Who owns crypto in the euro area? Drivers of crypto adoption, payment use, and its interaction with fiat cash

04/07/2026 European Central Bank Central banks

Using a survey of 39,507 adults in 17 euro-area countries, I find that crypto-asset owners and the niche subgroup of payers have distinct profiles. Owners – typically younger, male, and financially active – exhibit mixed preferences, valuing both cash-like privacy and card-like speed. Crypto payers display a cash-centric profile, seeking to replicate physical cash’s privacy and ease of use in digital form.

Green supply chains at risk: measuring the true economic and environmental costs

03/24/2026 European Central Bank Central banks

Our new methodology builds an inter-country input-output table that distinguishes green products from the rest, allowing us to assess vulnerabilities in green value chains. In a multi-country, multi-sector model, our table reveals that a decoupling of green supply chains between a US-centric West and a China-centric East could globally cut trade in green products by up to 20%, lower welfare by up to 3% and raise yearly global greenhouse gas emissions by about 50 million tonnes.

IFDP Paper: Risk in a Data-Rich Model

03/20/2026 Federal Reserve Central banks

Dario Caldara, Haroon Mumtaz, and Molin ZhongWe characterize asymmetric tail risk across over one hundred U.S. macroeconomic and financial variables using a dynamic factor model with stochastic volatility. The model unifies growth-at-risk, inflation-at-risk, and sectoral heterogeneity through common factors whose volatility responds endogenously to shocks, combined with heterogeneous factor loadings.

IFDP Paper: The Design and Effect of Tariff Retaliation: Evidence from the European Union

03/20/2026 Federal Reserve Central banks

Ece Fisgin, Johannes Fleck, Keith RichardsWe show that the EU’s 2018 retaliation against US steel and aluminum tariffs targeted goods with low US import dependence and high substitutability. For the majority of tariffed goods, the US share of EU imports declined notably and remained below pre-2018 levels even after the retaliatory tariffs were lifted, reflecting asymmetric effects of tariffs on trade diversion.

IFDP Paper: Volatile Rates, Fragile Growth: Global Financial Risk and Productivity Dynamics

03/20/2026 Federal Reserve Central banks

Nils Gornemann, Eugenio Rojas, Felipe SaffieDoes global financial risk affect long-run growth? Using a panel state-space model for emerging and advanced small open economies, we measure the effects of U.S. monetary policy uncertainty shocks. A one-standard-deviation shock lowers the level of the stochastic trend in emerging markets by at least 25 basis points after three years, with little effect in advanced economies.

FEDS Paper: Income Mobility of the Top One Percent

03/06/2026 Federal Reserve Central banks

David Splinter and Jeff LarrimoreCirculation into and out of the top one percent is pronounced in the U.S. One third exit after a year and two-thirds exit after a decade. This mobility lowers top income shares when shifting from annual to multi-year income measures. Intragenerational mobility over two decades lowers recent top one percent fiscal income shares by over 10 percent. Two-decade mobility reduces top 0.1% shares by over 20 percent, top 0.01% shares by 30 percent, and top 0.001% shares by 40 percent.

What regional data tell us about the euro area Phillips curve

02/23/2026 European Central Bank Central banks

Using regional data for 11 euro area countries from 1999 to 2023, instead of country-level data, we find that inflation still responds to economic slack, but this relationship is more modest and largely shaped by inflation expectations. This implies that traditional demand-side central bank policies may have limited direct effects on inflation, highlighting that anchoring expectations is essential for effective monetary policy transmission.

Pricing cascades – inflation in a networked economy

01/27/2026 European Central Bank Central banks

The post-pandemic inflation surge is often attributed to pent-up demand andopportunistic price hikes. In fact, it is better explained by the effects of theeconomy’s production network and “state-dependent” pricing, where firmschange prices optimally when the reward justifies the effort. Firms are tightlylinked through supply chains so a surge in prices upstream can triggersimultaneous repricing by many layers of firms downstream, fuelling broad-based inflation.

Risky collateral and default probability

01/07/2026 European Central Bank Central banks

We use a novel data set containing all corporate loans throughout the Eurozone to document a series of novel stylized facts on the relationship between collateral and the probability of default. First, we show that the pervasive empirical finding that riskier borrowers pledge collateral is driven by economists’ informational disadvantage relative to banks. Accounting for time-varying bank- and firm-specific risk factors produces negative correlations consistent with theory. Second, the relationship between pledging collateral and the probability of default is non-linear.

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