The beauty backfire effect: Being too attractive can hurt fitness influencers, new research shows
“Sex sells” has been a mantra in marketing for decades.
Geopolitical risk, bank lending and real effects on firms: evidence from the Russian invasion of Ukraine
This paper investigates whether geopolitical risk causes a reduction in bank lending. In particular, it focuses on how the increase in geopolitical risk stemming from the Russian invasion of Ukraine affected euro area bank credit supply. Matching granular supervisory and credit register data and using a panel difference-in-difference approach, the results show that banks with larger exposure to the increase in geopolitical risk cut lending significantly more than those with smaller exposure.
The protectionist gamble: How tariffs shape greenfield foreign direct investment
Motivated by current events, this paper assesses the impact of tariff increases on bilateral greenfield foreign direct investment (FDI) over the period 2016-2023. Leveraging a comprehensive dataset of announced greenfield investment projects, official FDI statistics, and bilateral product-level tariff data, we estimate a series of gravity equations to uncover key relationships. Our results show that, at an aggregate level, tariff increases are associated with a rise in greenfield FDI, consistent with the tariff-jumping hypothesis.
FEDS Paper: Does Financial Stress Affect Commodity Futures Traders' Positions?(Revised)
Shengwu Du, Travis D. Nesmith, and Yang HeppeFinancial stress can impact trading behavior in the U.S. commodity futures markets. To clarify the impact, we study absolute changes and relative exposure dynamics in traders' positions during two recent crises: the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and the COVID-19 pandemic. The nature of these two crises are very distinct, and we find that traders behaved quite differently.
Singles’ Day is a $150B holiday in China. Here’s why I think ‘11/11’ will catch on in the US
On Nov. 11 each year, a curious holiday takes over China. What began among Nanjing University students in the 1990s as a tongue-in-cheek counter to Valentine’s Day has exploded into the world’s largest shopping event: Singles’ Day.
Minutes of the CBDC Engagement Forum - May 2025
Meeting of the CBDC Engagement Forum
Developing distributional national accounts: first attempt to estimate a joint distribution for income and wealth for the euro area
In recent years, projects have sought to embed distributional aspects within national accounts, with household distributional information set to feature in the next System of National Accounts. There is growing emphasis on capturing all material dimensions of welfare—income, consumption, and wealth—at both macro and micro levels within a unified framework.
Reputation for Confidence
We model how a central bank communicates its noisy forecasts (forward guidance) while taking into account its own uncertainty (confidence) and the public’s perception of the bank’s uncertainty (reputation for confidence). This creates a mismatch between the public and central bank’s interpretation of the bank announcement which induces the bank to communicate with partial transparency and deliberate imprecision. Moreover, with higher confidence (lower reputation) announcements are more precise.
Investors prefer ‘I’ over ‘we’ when CEOs apologize
When corporate crises hit, the public looks to the CEO. From product recalls to workplace discrimination, to customer mistreatment scandals, CEOs are often thrust into the spotlight and forced to apologize.
But do the exact words they choose really matter?
Banking on assumptions? How banks model deposit maturities
How do banks manage the behavioural maturity of non-maturing deposits (NMDs)? Using a rich and confidential dataset, we investigate how banks model deposit maturities based on internal assumptions. Although NMDs are contractually floating-rate liabilities with zero maturity, banks reallocate them across different maturity buckets using models that reflect past customer behaviour. Notably, only 20% of NMDs are treated as having zero maturity, while about 10% are assigned maturities beyond seven years. We assess whether these modelling assumptions align with banks’ deposit structures.
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