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Working Paper
Eggs in One Basket: Security and Convenience of Digital Currencies
Digital currencies store balances in anonymous electronic addresses. We analyze the trade-offs between safety and convenience of aggregating balances in addresses, electronic wallets and banks. In our model agents balance the risk of theft of a large account with the cost to safeguarding a large number of passwords of many small accounts. Account custodians (banks, wallets and other payment service providers) have different objectives and tradeoffs on these dimensions; we analyze the welfare effects of differing industry structures and interdependencies, and in particular the consequences ...
Journal Article
Institutional Barriers and World Income Disparities
Why have the income disparities between fast-growing economies and development laggards widened over the past five decades? How important is the role played by institutional barriers with relation to technology adoption? Using cross-country analysis, we find that more-severe institutional barriers in several representative lag-behind countries actually hinder the process of structural transformation and economic development, causing these countries to fall below a representative group of fast-growing economies despite having similar or even better initial states five decades ago. We also find ...
Working Paper
Should the central bank issue e-money?
Should a central bank take over the provision of e-money, a circulable electronic liability? We discuss how e-money technology changes the tradeoff between public and private provision, and the tradeoff between e-money and a central bank's existing liabilities like bank notes and reserves. The tradeoffs depend on i) the technological setup of the e-money system (as a token or an account; centralized or decentralized); ii) the potential improvement in the implementation and transmission of monetary policy; iii) the risks to safety and privacy from cyber attacks; and iv) the uncertain impact on ...