Morgan Stanley issues China-only iPhones to its Hong Kong bankers
US bank’s move reflects rising concern over data security for staff travelling to mainland China
Luxury during wartime
What are high-end goods telling us about the economy?
IFDP Paper: Attention Allocation and Belief Distortions
Sai MaUsing microdata from the Michigan Survey of Consumers, we study how within-household reallocations of attention across news affect inflation expectation bias, measured relative to a real-time, machine-learning full-information benchmark. Shifting attention toward unfavorable (favorable) economic news increases (decreases) forecast bias substantially, while dropping attention to an unfavorable topic has little effect.
Is the Gulf losing its grip on the oil world?
One of the most striking features of the Iran war has been the resilience of the global oil market. Despite the disruption of flows through the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s most important oil transit chokepoint, prices have generally hovered around US$100 (£75) per barrel – a lower level than many observers had expected.
New SNAP rules requiring that benefits be used at stores selling healthier food could backfire
A man shops at El Recuerdo Market in Los Angeles in 2025, next to a sign indicating that customers may pay with SNAP benefits.
Deutsche Bank fined by UK for breaching Russia sanctions
OFSI fines lender £165,000 over payments linked to streamer Okko
Monzo boss pledges European expansion as profits jump
Diana Layfield pointed to ‘Monzo-shaped hole’ in markets across Europe
The supply chain spillovers of private equity buyouts
We study how private equity (PE) buyouts propagate through supply chains using unique firm-to-firm transactions data from Belgium. In normal times, suppliers of PE-backed firms outperform their peers by 5%–10% in employment and sales growth, primarily due to increased input demand from PE-backed customers rather than knowledge spillovers or other mechanisms. In economic downturns, however, this outperformance is attenuated and suppliers compress markups by around 8% as PE investors intensify bargaining pressure and reconfigure supply chains to extract cost savings.
External finance premium: market finance versus bank finance
This paper is the first to simultaneously examine firms’ market-based and bank-based external finance premia and investigate the behavior of corporate bond markets in the United States and the euro area, with a focus on country- and state-level heterogeneity in monetary unions. Using a unique micro-level dataset, we show that market finance premia, measured with corporate bond spreads, are remarkably similar in both the euro area and the US in terms of how little they depend on the issuer’s state or country of origin.
External finance premium: market finance versus bank finance
This paper is the first to simultaneously examine firms’ market-based and bank-based external finance premia and investigate the behavior of corporate bond markets in the United States and the euro area, with a focus on country- and state-level heterogeneity in monetary unions. Using a unique micro-level dataset, we show that market finance premia, measured with corporate bond spreads, are remarkably similar in both the euro area and the US in terms of how little they depend on the issuer’s state or country of origin.
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