’Tis the season for giving – and that means ’tis the season for shopping. Maybe you’ll splurge on a Black Friday or Cyber Monday deal, thinking, “I’ll just return it if they don’t like it.” But before you click “buy,” it’s worth knowing that many retailers have quietly tightened their return policies in recent years.
Not long ago, the idea of getting paid to share your morning routine online would have sounded absurd. Yet today, influencers are big business: The global market is expected to surpass US$32 billion by the end of 2025.
We estimate the contribution of discretionary fiscal policy measures to euro area inflation in the post-pandemic era using an extension of Bernanke and Blanchard (2024b)’s semi-structural model. Since the pandemic, aggregate discretionary fiscal measures had a modest yet progressively increasing positive contribution to inflation that partly worked through an indirect effect on wage growth and inflation expectations. However, net indirect taxes helped to contain inflationary pressures, both during the pandemic and energy crises.
Lucia Gurrieri, Chase Ross, Ben Schmiedt, Alexandros P. Vardoulakis, and Vladimir YankovWe examine whether access to the Federal Reserve's Overnight Reverse Repo Facility (ON RRP) affects money market fund flows during flight-to-safety episodes.
Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty ImagesWarnings this week from the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) about sabotage threats marked an important shift in tone.
And they raise important questions about how the Australian government should respond.
Electric delivery vehicles powered by renewable energy are helping several multinationals lower their emissions.
This paper introduces a novel methodology to enhance the granularity of Inter-Country Input-Output (ICIO) tables. While our general methodology can be applied to any products of interest, we show that the well-documented distortions caused by sectoral aggregation in ICIO tables are particularly pronounced for products with a low substitutability, such as those essential to the green transition (e.g. electric batteries, rare earths). We therefore apply our framework to construct a disaggregated ICIO table that singles out 129 products essential to the energy transition.
Is there an undesired side-effect of banking regulation on the non-bank sector? How effective is the non-bank transmission channel of monetary policy in the presence of macroprudential policy? Using a state-dependent local projection approach and a rich dataset capturing macroprudential tightening across euro area countries, we present strong cross-country heterogeneity. In financially conservative markets (Germany, France, the Netherlands), tight monetary policy combined with stricter macroprudential measures significantly contracts investment fund assets.
We study how survey-based measures of funding needs and availability influence the transmission of euro area monetary policy to investment. We first provide evidence that funding needs are primarily driven by fundamentals, while perceived funding availability captures financial conditions. Using these two measures, we assess how the effectiveness of monetary policy varies with fundamentals and financial conditions. Our results indicate that monetary policy is most effective when firms’ fundamentals are strong.
Banks can grant loans to firms bilaterally or in syndicates. We study this choice by combining bilateral loan data with syndicated loan data. We show that loan size alone does not adequately explain syndication. Instead, banks’ ability to manage risks and firm riskiness drive the choice to syndicate. Banks are more likely to syndicate loans if their risk-bearing capacity is low and if screening and monitoring come at a high cost. Syndicated loans are more expensive and more sensitive to loan risk than bilateral loans.
