Shoppers can take cues when managers step in to help their staff. Grab on Unsplash, CC BYWorkers in sales might roll their eyes when they deal with a micromanaging boss. But many customers actually appreciate it if a store manager offers to help when they’re mulling over a purchase, whether it’s a dishwasher, a tablet or a lawnmower.

That’s the main finding of a new study I co-authored.

This box discusses the heterogeneous impact on EU countries of China’s rapid industrial transformation, which is reshaping global trade patterns. The similarity between the export structures of China and several EU countries has increased substantially since 2019, particularly in machinery and transport equipment, and is most pronounced in manufacturing-intensive economies, such as Germany. At the same time, China’s goods imports have become less aligned with EU export structures, illustrating China’s decreased reliance on European industrial goods.

Artificial intelligence is transforming financial markets by enabling investors and intermediaries to extract more information from increasingly abundant data through advances in algorithms and computing power. We discuss how AI changes information production and decision-making, labor demand, and financial intermediation, with a particular emphasis on securities markets. We then survey the implications of this transformation for market efficiency, competition, informational frictions, and financial stability.

This paper studies whether securitisation affects monetary policy transmission via banks. Using granular loan-level data from the euro area, we show that banks actively engaged in securitisation adjust credit supply more strongly in response to monetary policy shocks than a matched sample of non-securitising banks. This is because securitisation expands banks’ lending capacity, but by increasing reliance on investors whose required returns and risk appetite are more sensitive to monetary policy conditions.