Financial Policymaking after Crises: Public vs. Private Interests
What drives actual government policies after financial crises? In this paper, we first present a simple model of post-crisis policymaking driven by...
The Spread of COVID-19 in London: Network Effects and Optimal Lockdowns
We generalise a stochastic version of the workhorse SIR (Susceptible-Infectious- Removed) epidemiological model to account for spatial dynamics...
Digital Currency and Economic Crises: Helping States Respond
The current crisis, at the time of writing, has had a profound impact on the financial world, introducing the need for creative approaches to...
Parimutuel betting markets: racetracks and lotteries revisited
This paper surveys the state of the art in research in racetrack and lottery markets. Market efficiency and the pricing of various wagers is studied...
Which programming language is best for economic research: Julia, Matlab, Python or R?
The most widely used programming languages for economic research are Julia, Matlab, Python and R. This column uses three criteria to compare the...
Market Fragmentation and Contagion
We study the transmission of liquidity shocks from one sector of the economy to other sectors in a general equilibrium model with multiple trading...
Who Bears Risk in China’s Non-financial Enterprise Debt?
This paper analyses of how risk is allocated in China’s markets for debt issued by non-financial enterprises. Compared to other major corporate bond...
Finance and politics: New insights
A rapidly expanding literature has shown the importance of political economy factors for legislative and regulatory actions in the financial sector...
Financial Volatility and Economic Growth, 1870–2016
We investigate the causal impact of financial risk on economic growth, using a panel spanning 150 years and 74 countries. Persistent low risk...
Wisdom of Crowds Detects COVID-19 Severity Ahead of Officially Available Data
During the unfolding of a crisis, it is crucial to determine its severity, yet access to reliable data is challenging. We investigate the relation...
Higher-Order Uncertainty in Financial Markets: Evidence from a Consensus Pricing Service
We assess the ability of an information aggregation mechanism that operates in the over-the-counter market for financial derivatives to reduce...
The political scar of epidemics
What will be the political legacy of the COVID-19 pandemic? This column uses data from the 2006-2018 Gallup World Polls to show that epidemic exposure...
The Political Scar of Epidemics
What will be the political legacy of the Coronavirus pandemic? We find that epidemic exposure in an individual’s “impressionable years” (ages 18 to 25...
Revenge of the experts: Will COVID-19 renew or diminish trust in science?
It is argued that COVID-19 will reverse the ongoing trend of challenging the value of science and the integrity of scientists. This column shows that...
Revenge of the Experts: Will COVID-19 Renew or Diminish Public Trust in Science?
An effect of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is sometimes suggested, will be to reverse the secular trend toward questioning the value of scientific...
Volatility, dark trading and market quality: evidence from the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic-driven market volatility
We exploit the exogenous shock of the COVID-19 pandemic on financial markets and regulatory restrictions on dark trading to investigate how volatility...
