AI and online shopping: how Shein, Temu and others get you hooked

In recent years, several websites selling ultra-low-cost goods have appeared on the French market. Shein, Temu and AliExpress, to name but a few, are shaking up the online retail landscape. According to a study conducted by BPCE Digital & Payments, the number of payment cards recording at least one monthly transaction on a discount site increased by 20% between the first quarters of 2022 and 2023.

Why is Halloween starting so much earlier each year? A business professor explains

A display of Halloween products for sale in West Covina, Calif., on Sept. 10, 2025. Frederic J. Brown/Getty ImagesHalloween is a fun, scary time for children and adults alike – but why does the holiday seem to start so much earlier every year? Decades ago, when I was young, Halloween was a much smaller affair, and people didn’t start preparing until mid-October.

Fiscal announcements and households’ beliefs: evidence from the euro area

This paper studies the effects of fiscal policy announcements on household expectations. We document announcements of price-related expansionary fiscal measures in response to the cost-of-living crisis in the four largest euro area economies and exploit the exogenous timing of fiscal actions relative to household survey participation to estimate their causal effects. Following fiscal announcements, households revise their beliefs: inflation perceptions rise, and unemployment perceptions fall.

IFDP Paper: The case for supporting liquidity supply in (some corners of) non-bank intermediation

Sirio AramonteAfter the Global Financial Crisis, the liquidity-supply ecosystem that underpins nonbank intermediation shifted away from traditional dealers. Instead, it started to rely more on intermediaries with fragile funding structures and opportunistic investment strategies. Over the years, stress episodes saw the sudden retrenchment of these intermediaries, which amplified liquidity imbalances and market malfunction.

IFDP Paper: Retail inventories and inflation dynamics: The price margin channel

Neil Mehrotra, Hyunseung Oh, and Julio L. OrtizUsing industry-level panel data and plausibly exogenous variation in supply conditions, we estimate the elasticity of retail price margins with respect to inventories along the retailer's optimal pricing curve. We find that this elasticity is negative and statistically significant, implying that lower finished-good inventories lead to higher price margins.

Pages

Subscribe to Front page feed