infonet-economy

According to economic theory, repeated interactions can play a crucial role in shaping trust. We randomly allocated people to treatments that promote interactions with bankers. Next, these people play incentivised trust games with their own banker and with an anonymous other banker. While the effect on trust in the own banker is limited, the impact on trust in other bankers is…

This paper presents a comprehensive examination of the determination and evolution of inflation expectations, with a focus on emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs). The results suggest that long-term inflation expectations in EMDEs are not as well anchored as those in advanced economies, despite notable improvements over the past two decades. Indeed, in EMDEs, long-term…

We consider the drivers and implications of the growth of "BigTech" in finance – ie the financial services offerings of technology companies with established presence in the market for digital services. BigTech firms often start with payments. Thereafter, some expand into the provision of credit, insurance and money management products, either directly or in cooperation with…

Globalization and robotics (globotics) are transforming the world economy at an explosive pace. While much of the literature has focused on rich nations, the changes are quite likely to affect developing nations in important ways. The premise of the paper - which should be regarded as a thought-piece - is based on an extreme thought experiment. What does development look like when…

Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2020 ; 2020ECO001.

Desde principios del 2000, muchos países latinoamericanos alcanzaron un notable crecimiento económico acompañado de la reducción de la pobreza y la desigualdad, debido en gran parte a la persistente aplicación del patrón secular de exportación de materias primas. El fin del superciclo de los precios de los las materias primas en 2014 puso en riesgo algunas de estas ganancias en…

The Swiss Federal government finances are in an excellent shape: debt is small (and decreasing), and carries a low interest rate. This paper reviews the prospects for the Swiss finances drawing on the recent literature. We argue that the current policy of running surpluses and paying down the debt is inefficient, and propose three alternatives. First, as the interest rate on the debt…

The online trading platform Alibaba provides financial technology (FinTech) credit for millions of micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs). Using an internal credit score threshold that governs the allocation of credit, we apply a Fuzzy Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD) to explore the causal effect of credit access on firm volatility. We find that credit access significantly…