Do targeted macroprudential measures impact non-targeted sectors too? We investigate the compositional changes in the supply of credit by Swiss banks, exploiting their differential exposure to the activation in 2013 of the countercyclical capital buffer (CCyB) which targeted banks’ exposure to residential mortgages. We find that the additional capital requirements resulting from the activation of the CCyB are associated with higher growth in banks’ commercial lending. While banks are lending more to all types of businesses, the new macroprudential policy benefits smaller and riskier businesses the most. However, the interest rates and other costs of obtaining credit for these firms rise as well.

We dissect the impact of a large and sudden exchange rate appreciation on Swiss border import prices, retail prices, and consumer expenditures on domestic and imported nondurable goods, following the removal of the EUR/CHF floor in January 2015. Cross-sectional variation in border price changes by currency of invoicing carries over to consumer prices and allocations, impacting retail prices of imports and competing domestic goods, as well as import expenditures. We provide measures of the sensitivity of retail import prices to border prices and the sensitivity of import shares to relative prices, which is higher when using retail prices than border prices.

Distributed ledgers promise to enable the classical vision of money as a universal transaction record. But is it ever optimal to update a ledger through decentralized consensus? Analyzing an exchange economy with credit, we show that centralized updating is optimal when long-term rewards are more valued, minimizing redundant validation costs and maximizing economic surplus. Decentralization becomes preferable under weaker intertemporal incentives and when validators are drawn from market participants. We show how competing ledgers – anonymous or identified, permissioned or permissionless – can achieve socially optimal outcomes even in low-trust environments. Our framework provides a foundation for designing robust and efficient ledger systems.