Search Results
Working Paper
Financial regulations and price inconsistencies across bitcoin markets
We document systematic differences in bitcoin prices across 11 different markets representing 26% of global bitcoin trade volume. These differences must ? due to the identical nature of all bitcoin ? result from characteristics of markets themselves. We examine differences across the markets and find that those which do not require customer identification for establishing an account are more likely to deviate from representative market prices than those which do. This implies that standard financial regulations, specifically know-your-customer regulations, can have a non-negligible impact on ...
Working Paper
ICT Services and their Prices: What do they tell us about Productivity and Technology?
This paper reassesses the link between ICT prices, technology, and productivity. To understand how the ICT sector could come to the rescue of a whole economy, we extend a multi-sector model due to Oulton (2012) to include ICT services (e.g., cloud services) and use it to calibrate the steady-state contribution of the ICT sector to growth in aggregate U.S. labor productivity. Because ICT technologies diffuse through the economy increasingly via purchases of cloud and data analytic services that are not fully accounted for in the standard narrative on ICT's contribution to economic growth, the ...
Report
Rational bias in macroeconomic forecasts
This paper develops a model of macroeconomic forecasting in which the wages firms pay their forecasters are a function of their accuracy as well as the publicity they generate for their employers by being correct. In the resulting Nash equilibrium, forecasters with identical models, information, and incentives nevertheless produce a variety of predictions in order to maximize their expected wages. In the case of heterogeneous incentives, the forecasters whose wages are most closely tied to publicity, as opposed to accuracy, produce the forecasts that deviate most from the consensus. We find ...
Working Paper
Data, Privacy Laws and Firm Production: Evidence from the GDPR
By regulating how firms collect, store, and use data, privacy laws may change the role of data in production and alter firm demand for information technology inputs. We study how firms respond to privacy laws in the context of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by using seven years of data from a large global cloud-computing provider. Our difference-in-difference estimates indicate that, in response to the GDPR, EU firms decreased data storage by 26% and data processing by 15% relative to comparable U.S. firms, becoming less “data-intensive.” To estimate the costs of the ...
Working Paper
Accounting for Innovations in Consumer Digital Services: IT still matters
This paper develops a framework for measuring digital services in the face of ongoing innovations in the delivery of content to consumers. We capture what Brynjolfsson and Saunders (2009) call "free goods" as the capital services generated by connected consumers' stocks of IT digital goods; this service flow augments the existing measure of personal consumption in GDP. Its value is determined by the intensity with which households use their IT capital to consume content delivered over networks, and its volume depends on the quality of the IT capital. Consumers pay for delivery services, ...
Discussion Paper
State-of-the-Field Conference on Cyber Risk to Financial Stability
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York partnered with Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) for the second annual State-of-the-Field Conference on Cyber Risk to Financial Stability on December 14-15, 2020. Hosted virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the conference took place amidst the unfolding news of a cyberattack against a major cybersecurity vendor and software vendor, underscoring vulnerabilities from cyber risk.
Working Paper
“Harvest Now Decrypt Later”: Examining Post-Quantum Cryptography and the Data Privacy Risks for Distributed Ledger Networks
This paper analyzes the risks posed by future-state quantum computers, specifically the “harvest now decrypt later” (HNDL) risk. We review foundational concepts of quantum computing to address the present and ongoing threat of HNDL to currently protected data. We use the Bitcoin network as an illustrative example to study the implications of HNDL for distributed ledger cryptocurrency networks that rely upon traditional cryptography. We posit that while cryptocurrency distributed ledger network maintainers could successfully deploy post-quantum cryptography (PQC) mitigations to protect the ...
Working Paper
Algorithms as Shadow Regulation: Secondary Market Access Overrides Home Buyer Credit Risk
Using confidential HMDA data on 30 million purchase applications, we show how automated underwriting distorts credit allocation. We document a severe 7.5-percentage point jump in denials at the 50% debt-to-income threshold. This "cliff" is unique to Fannie Mae’s software, whereas Freddie Mac’s algorithm exhibits no matching friction. By exploiting institutional routing to isolate secondary market access as the causal mechanism, we find a stark price-quantity asymmetry: the interest rate penalty is a mere 3 basis points, yet the threshold suppresses $7.7 billion in conventional ...
Working Paper
The Increasing Deflationary Influence of Consumer Digital Access Services
Consumer digital access services—internet, mobile phone, cable TV, and streaming—accounted for over 2 percent of U.S. household consumption in 2018. We construct prices for these services using direct measures of volume (data transmitted, talk time, and hours of programming). Our price index fell 12 percent per year from 1988 to 2018 while official prices moved up modestly. Using our digital services index, we estimate total personal consumption expenditure (PCE) prices have risen nearly 1/2 percentage point slower than the official index since 2008. Importantly, the spread between ...
Journal Article
Decentralized Finance (DeFi): Transformative Potential and Associated Risks
Financial services in the crypto finance world are provided by a combination of centralized finance (CeFi) organizations and decentralized finance (DeFi). CeFi's are roughly similar to traditional financial intermediaries, but DeFi seeks to provide services using smart contracts (computer code) rather than an intermediary. DeFi's unusual structure creates some interesting potential but also raises new risks in addition to those already inherent in blockchains and crypto finance. This paper reviews some of the opportunities and risks.