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Economic Research

Photo: Old Dutch coins from the province of Holland with ancient Dutch banknotes.
Dutch Treat: The Netherlands’ Exorbitant Privilege in the Eighteenth Century
The term “exorbitant privilege” emerged in the 1960s to describe the U.S. economy’s advantages from the dollar’s status as the de facto global reserve currency. The authors examine the exorbitant privilege held by the Netherlands in the eighteenth century, when the Dutch guilder enjoyed global reserve currency status. The private actions of financial institutions created and maintained this privilege, and while it benefited the Dutch financial system, this privilege also laid the seeds of later financial crisis.
By Stein Berre and Asani Sarkar
Photo: Partial calendar with a green pin on the 31st.
End-of-Month Activity Across the Treasury Market
Previously, the authors showed that interdealer trading in benchmark U.S. Treasury notes and bonds concentrates on the last trading day of the month. They extend their trading activity analysis to the full range of Treasury securities and market segments and find that trading is even more concentrated on the last trading day of the month for other types of Treasury securities and in the dealer-to-customer segment of the market.
By Michael Fleming, Jonathan Palash-Mizner, and Or Shachar
A Country-Specific View of Tariffs
Important elements of the new U.S. trade policy are apparent in data through July. What stands out are the large differences in realized tariff rates by trading partner, ranging from less than 5 percent for Canada and Mexico to 15 percent for Japan and to 40 percent for China. The authors show that the bulk of cross-country differences in tariff rates is explained by two factors: the U.S.-Canada-Mexico free trade agreement and differing sales shares in tariff-exempt categories.
By Matthew Higgins and Thomas Klitgaard
Photo: Washington, DC, USA - June 25, 2022: The logo of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
The Rise of Sponsored Service for Clearing Repo
Recently instituted rule amendments have initiated a large migration of dealer-to-client Treasury repurchase (repo) trades to central clearing. To date, the main avenue used to access central clearing is Sponsored Service, a clearing product that has, until now, received little attention. Highlighting the results from recent research, the authors summarize the institutional details of this service and its costs and benefits. They then document some basic facts on how market participants use Sponsored Service, based on confidential data.
By Adam Copeland and R. Jay Kahn
Do Employers Comply with Pay Transparency Requirements in Job Postings?
New Jersey and Vermont have recently joined a growing number of U.S. states in requiring employers to include an estimated salary range in their online job listings. Has this push for greater pay transparency been effective? The authors use granular data on U.S. job postings to assess employers’ compliance with these new regulations and find that many employers ignore pay transparency requirements: roughly a quarter of job listings covered by these laws fail to include salary information.
By Richard Audoly and Roshie Xing
A Historical Perspective on Stablecoins
Digital currencies have grown rapidly in recent years. In July 2025, Congress passed the “Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act” (GENIUS) Act, establishing the first comprehensive federal framework governing the issuance of stablecoins. The author places stablecoins in a historical perspective by comparing them to national bank notes, a form of privately issued money that circulated in the United States from 1863 through 1935.
By Stephan Luck
RESEARCH TOPICS
Cognitive Health, Household Financial Decision-Making, and Intrahousehold Financial Spillovers
This study examines how the approach a couple uses for household financial decision-making affects the financial outcomes of each partner when one member experiences a decline in cognitive health from the onset of Alzheimer’s disease or a related dementia. They assess whether these effects are amplified or diminished depending on the couple’s approach to financial organization, focusing on financial outcomes related to debt and debt management.
Carole Roan Gresenz, Jean M. Mitchell, R. Scott Turner, Wilbert van der Klaauw, and Crystal Wang, Staff Report 1169, October 2025
Supervising Failing Banks
Banking supervision seeks to safeguard the health of the financial system by monitoring financial institutions and enforcing regulatory compliance. The effectiveness of banking supervision, however, is hotly debated. The authors study the role of banking supervision in anticipating, monitoring, and disciplining failing banks. They document that supervisors anticipate most bank failures with a high degree of accuracy. Supervisors also play an important role in requiring troubled banks to recognize losses, taking enforcement actions, and ultimately closing failing banks.
Sergio Correia, Stephan Luck, and Emil Verner, Staff Report 1168, October 2025
Understanding Consumer Demand for “Buy Now, Pay Later”
Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) services typically split the purchase price into an upfront payment followed by interest-free installments. But despite BNPL’s rapid growth since the pandemic, little is known about which of its features draws consumers to use it. The authors conduct a novel probabilistic stated choice experiment, varying BNPL attributes across hypothetical scenarios to estimate consumers’ underlying preferences. Their estimates shed light on which features cause consumers to choose (or avoid) BNPL.
Felix Aidala, Gizem Koşar, Daniel Mangrum, and Wilbert van der Klaauw, Staff Report 1167, October 2025
Financial Inclusion in the United States: Measurement, Determinants, and Recent Developments
In recent years, technological change and pandemic-related policies have helped expand access to banking, credit, and payment services to more consumers. However, many people and small firms still lack access to financial services to help them better manage day-to-day finances, absorb economic shocks, and build wealth. The authors review financial inclusion in the U.S., drawing on survey evidence and academic studies, to identify the causes of financial exclusion and the effectiveness of alternative efforts to expand financial inclusion.
Matteo Crosignani, Jonathan Kivell, Daniel Mangrum, Donald Morgan, Ambika Nair, Joelle Scally, and Wilbert van der Klaauw, Economic Policy Review 31, no. 3, September
Transformative and Subsistence Entrepreneurs: Origins and Impacts on Economic Growth
Technological progress depends on the interaction between entrepreneurs and inventors, and the nature of this interaction hinges on the type of entrepreneur. Subsistence entrepreneurs typically focus on day-to-day operations with limited growth ambitions, while transformative entrepreneurs seek to commercialize novel ideas and drive innovation. Using Danish microdata, the authors show that transformative entrepreneurs—those who hire R&D workers—tend to have higher IQ and education and build fast-growing firms than other entrepreneurs.
Ufuk Akcigit, Harun Alp, Jeremy Pearce, and Marta Prato, Staff Report 1166, September 2025
How Retrainable Are AI-Exposed Workers?
The debate over whether advances in artificial intelligence (AI) will ultimately complement or substitute labor has drawn significant attention. However, there is a dearth of research examining the role that existing job training programs might play in helping AI-exposed workers adapt to the evolving labor market. The authors assemble a new workforce development dataset and document that workers in AI-exposed occupations are surprisingly resilient in adjusting to AI pressures through job training.
Benjamin Hyman, Benjamin Lahey, Karen Ni, and Laura Pilossoph, Staff Report 1165, August 2025
How Do Supply Shocks to Inflation Generalize? Evidence From the Pandemic Era in Europe
The authors document how the interaction of supply chain pressures, elevated household inflation expectations, and firm pricing power contributed to the pandemic-era surge in consumer price inflation in the euro area. Initially, supply-side shocks exerted more inflationary pressure on directly affected sectors such as manufacturing. However, despite a later easing of these shocks, inflation became increasingly generalized across the entire European economy, extending even to sectors not directly impacted by supply constraints, such as services.
Viral V. Acharya, Matteo Crosignani, Tim Eisert, and Christian Eufinger, Staff Report 1164, August 2025
A Practitioner’s Note on the Shapley-Owen-Shorrocks Decomposition
The authors provide a simple overview of the Shapley-Owen-Shorrocks decomposition, an effective alternative when studying non-linear outcomes that come from the interaction of various factors. They show that using the Shapley-Owen value, extended to inequality decompositions in Shorrocks (1999, 2013), provides an additive decomposition that sums to one and is easily interpretable in terms of the contribution of different inputs (or groups of them) to some aggregate outcome. They also provide several examples to help implement the approach.
Richard Audoly, Rory McGee, Sergio Ocampo, and Gonzalo Paz-Pardo, Staff Report 1163, August 2025
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