Carbon pricing initiatives, in the form of carbon taxes or emissions trading systems, have mushroomed in the last two decades, providing an opportunity to better understand their economic consequences. This column shows that emissions trading systems are associated with larger volatility in consumer price inflation, while no significant impact is found in the case of […]
Why don’t more households participate in the stock market? The two reasons often cited in the literature are risk aversion and frictions that prevent participation, such as the cost of maintaining a brokerage account or of paying attention to the markets. This column exploits firms switching their default asset allocation from a money market fund […]
At the end of the 19th century in Italy, books and manuscripts were transferred from monasteries to public libraries, making much of the knowledge safeguarded in monastic libraries suddenly available to the public. This column explores the link between this development and innovation. Access to knowledge through public libraries significantly increased innovation: municipalities that received […]
A race is raging among global powers to secure access to critical minerals to power the simultaneous energy and digital transitions the world is experiencing. The extraordinary growth in demand for critical minerals is putting upward pressure on prices and stimulating new critical mineral discoveries all around the world. However, in developing countries, this new […]
