By Giovanni Donato and Cédric Tille Financial globalisation since the 1990s has led to large holdings of cross-border assets and liabilities in many countries. This column analyses the yields on assets and liabilities for 20 advanced and 22 emerging economies over 1999-2023, and finds that they were on a mostly downward trend, before increasing from[…]

By Jon Danielsson Each financial crisis brings more financial supervision, more models and larger buffers – but still fragility persists. The paradox of perfect supervision is that the very attempt to safeguard stability can increase systemic risk by increasing complexity and synchronising behaviour. This column argues that resilience, not ever-tighter risk-informed control, should be the[…]

by Carlos Madeira I build hand-collected data with biographical information on central bank leaders across more than 200 countries. I show that gender, age, education and career profiles changed substantially since the 1980s. Recent years show more women, PhDs, people with previous roles in finance ministries and older central bankers. I then show life experience[…]