Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC) have attracted considerable interest and its deployment on a global scale is imminent. However, CBDC face several challenges. They include: legal, technological, and political considerations. We summarize those challenges and add a few more that have not received much attention in the literature. We then focus on two forms of CBDC: a narrow version that only replaces notes and coins and a broader form with a deposit feature. The narrow CBDC is the most likely one to be first introduced. Next, relying on evidence of past episodes of financial innovation, and using cross-country data, we explore the hypothetical impact of CBDC on inflation and financial stability, based on the historical behaviour of the velocity of circulation and incorporating a CBDC’s impact using McCallum’s policy rule which sets the stance of monetary policy based on money growth. Our simulations suggest that CBDC need not produce higher inflation, but financial stability remains at risk. We provide some policy implications.

This essay examines the extent to which research on the economics of race and crime produced by Black economists or published in the flagship journal of the organization of Black economists, the Review of Black Political Economy (RBPE), is undervalued by mainstream economics. We use modern bibliometric methods to test for citation biases in the economics of crime literature. We also identify the contributions of three streams of research overlooked in the mainstream literature: identity, police use of force, and mass incarceration. We find evidence that Blacks publishing on race and crime in top economics journals are less likely to be cited than non-Blacks and that articles published in the RBPE are less likely to be cited than articles published in other journals. A review of some under-cited articles reveals that themes related to identity, police use of force, and mass incarceration hold valuable insights for policy makers and those seeking solutions to problems of persistent racial disparities in the criminal legal system. (JEL A11, A14, H75, J15, K42)

Abstract In imperfectly competitive settings, a firm's price depends on its own costs as well as those of its competitors. We demonstrate that this has important implications for the estimation and interpretation of pass-through. Leveraging a large input cost shock resulting from the fracking boom, we isolate price responses to firm-specific, regional, and industry-wide input cost shocks in the U.S. oil refining industry. The pass-through of these components varies from near zero to full pass-through, reconciling seemingly disparate results from the literature. We illustrate the policy implications of rival cost pass-through in the context of a tax on refinery carbon emissions.

ABSTRACT We provide evidence that regulatory guidance aimed at improving audit efficiency and effectiveness—allowing auditor reliance on a multi‐location client's competent and objective internal audit function (IAF)—can unintentionally increase auditors' litigation risk. Our research is important in demonstrating how client characteristics and juror cognitive processing, such as the number of client locations and jurors' susceptibility to the numerosity heuristic, factors beyond auditors' control, can exacerbate their litigation exposure. Consistent with theoretical predictions, we find that susceptibility to the numerosity heuristic contributes to jurors assessing an increased likelihood of misstatement on multi‐location compared to single‐location audits. Furthermore, these assessments of higher misstatement risk on multi‐location audits lead jurors to perceive that auditor reliance on the client's IAF in multi‐location audits is less appropriate (i.e., not normal). Accordingly, jurors judge that auditors are more negligent when they rely on the IAF during multi‐location audits than when they do not, but IAF reliance does not impact auditor negligence on single‐location audits. Our results suggest auditor reluctance to use a qualified IAF, despite client pressure and regulatory allowance, can provide potential benefits to firms in terms of reduced litigation exposure. Thus, we demonstrate the legal regime can undermine the objectives of regulators' guidance to enhance audit efficiency and corporate governance.

Rust (1997b) discovered a class of dynamic programs that can be solved in polynomial time with a randomized algorithm. For these dynamic programs, the optimal values of a polynomially large sample of states are sufficient statistics for the (near) optimal values everywhere, and the values of this random sample can be bootstrapped from the sample itself. However, I show that this class is limited, as it requires all but a vanishingly small fraction of state variables to behave arbitrarily similarly to i.i.d. uniform random variables.

ABSTRACT This study examines corporate integrity culture—that is, a firm's shared values and behaviors related to compliance, trustworthiness, and ethics. Different from prior research that associates culture measures with general firm‐level outcomes, we evaluate the pervasiveness of the integrity culture within an organization across two disparate business functions: operations and financial reporting. We first develop a measure of corporate integrity culture based on firms' internal control environments and show that, as predicted, weak integrity culture contributes to both operational and financial non‐compliance. We next document the predicted positive contemporaneous association between operational and financial non‐compliance, controlling for the integrity culture reflected in the internal control environment. Given the organizational and physical distances and lack of day‐to‐day interactions between the two business functions, we infer that management's “tone at the top” likely affects non‐compliance in both functions. Finally, for firms with existing operational non‐compliance, we find more negative market reactions to accounting restatements and higher CEO turnover propensities following restatements. These results indicate that top management must consistently reinforce a culture of compliance and integrity, lest it decay throughout the organization. Our results also imply that regulators evaluating compliance in specific functions could benefit from reviewing compliance in other functions within the firm.

Abstract The U.S. government uses its voting power to direct IMF loans to countries where U.S. banks are exposed to sovereign default (a de facto bailout). This effect is stronger in years when the costs of direct bailouts are higher and is also found among major European IMF members. We find that de facto bailouts reduce government incentives to default and that U.S. Congressional voting on IMF funding is consistent with a private interest view of government. Overall, we identify an alternative mechanism through which governments can backstop the losses of large multinational banks.

We explore the contributions of Black economists to research on major economic and social policy problems in the United States. We focus on applications in education, poverty and economic mobility, and public finance to extract common themes and patterns. The major themes that emerge include (i) Black economists’ examination of individual versus structural explanations for economic outcomes, (ii) the role played by race and discrimination, (iii) the endogenous determination of race, and (iv) the nature of objectivity and positionality in economic research. A unifying theme is a willingness of many Black economists to engage critically on economic policy issues, using frameworks both from within as well as outside of mainstream neoclassical economics.(JEL A11, D72, I23, I28, I32, J15, K42)