Research

Artificial intelligence makes data more productive, but it also makes data more costly to govern. This paper asks where that governance cost shows up in firms' own risk disclosures. Using roughly 84,000 firm-years of SEC annual filings for US-listed firms from 1994 to 2023, the paper builds layered text and LLM measures to separate AI invention from AI adoption and relates both to disclosed attention to data-breach risk. AI adoption is associated with roughly 5 per cent higher breach-risk attention relative to the sample mean; AI invention is economically negligible once both margins enter the same specification. The wedge survives an explicit non-AI digitisation placebo built from the same filings. Among adopters, breach-risk attention is highest where deployment is customer-facing. Firms that explicitly connect AI to breach vulnerability describe it as expanding exposure in 101 of 103 directional statements. Supplementary evidence from staggered state Data Breach Notification laws is directionally consistent with the disclosure results.

Immediate international monetary spillovers are large and broadly shared, but standard daily designs understate their magnitude and overstate cross-country heterogeneity because most foreign cash markets are closed at FOMC announcement times. US-traded country ETFs allow shocks and outcomes to be measured in the same high-frequency window. A geographic discontinuity validates the design. ETF returns predict next-open local-index gaps for closed markets but not open markets. In a 37-country panel, spillovers are negative in every country. A one-standard-deviation surprise reprices roughly $150-$300 billion in non-US equity wealth within thirty minutes. Half reflects local-currency equity repricing. Quarterly effects persist.

We analyse whether monetary policy transmits differentially across firms with varying environmental performance. Using high-frequency identification around FOMC announcements from 2005 to 2025, we decompose policy shocks into target and path components. Firms with superior environmental profiles exhibited substantial vulnerability to forward guidance before the Paris Agreement, reflecting the long-duration nature of sustainable investments. This sensitivity attenuated completely thereafter, coinciding with the deepening of green bond markets that enabled firms to neutralise duration exposure through enhanced hedging capacity. Conversely, clientele effects provided persistent insulation against current rate shocks throughout. Cross-sectional evidence indicates larger firms with superior market access exhibited attenuated vulnerability, consistent with hedging capacity mechanisms. Our findings demonstrate that environmental heterogeneity in transmission evolved with financial market development rather than reflecting immutable technological constraints.

Central banks discuss central bank digital currency (CBDC) far more often than they move from research to implementation. This paper asks whether public commitment in central bank communication predicts that transition or whether it mainly captures participation in the policy debate. Using a country-year panel built from more than 15,000 scored central bank speeches across 122 jurisdictions between 2015 and 2025, the paper constructs measures of CBDC commitment and the constraints emphasised in official communication, and links them to retail CBDC stage progression. Public commitment tracks whether CBDC is on the agenda, but it has little independent association with movement beyond research once prior project stage and common time shocks are absorbed. Progression is less likely in jurisdictions with more open capital accounts and where communication places greater weight on legal and regulatory obstacles, with more limited evidence that greater central bank independence is associated with slower progression. The correlates of CBDC discussion and CBDC implementation therefore differ, consistent with an institutional environment in which public deliberation is low-cost while implementation exposes the central bank to open-economy, legal, and mandate-related risks that vary across jurisdictions. The paper contributes new speech-based evidence to the CBDC adoption literature and documents that the structural conditions under which CBDC debate turns into advancement are distinct from those that shape the debate itself.

Central banks now speak openly about climate change. Whether climate enters the official record through which monetary-policy decisions are explained is another matter. This paper compares more than 37,000 speeches from 136 institutions with nearly 3,600 official meeting records from 26 central banks across 14 languages. Within the common 26-institution sample observed in both channels, benchmark comparisons show that climate is not uniquely excluded but filtered. Half of the central banks publishing meeting records never mention it in that record, and among those that do the median lag from first climate speech to first recorded mention is 18 years. When climate does appear there, it does not appear in its public form; it is framed chiefly through inflation, financial stability, and policy instruments. The paper argues that climate enters monetary-policy records through mandate translation, whereby a broad public issue becomes admissible only after it is recast in the language of the central-bank mandate.

This paper investigates the pricing of human capital within a modernizing imperial state. Using a newly constructed personnel panel of 4,200 Ottoman Post and Telegraph officials (1870s-1905), we document a steep, monotonic wage gradient where advanced credentials command premia of 37-46 percent relative to primary schooling. The administration also systematically rewarded task-relevant skills, with robust returns to French proficiency and technical telegraph training. These premia were dynamic: returns to advanced education rose sharply in Istanbul, reflecting the concentration of complex administrative tasks at the imperial center. Decomposing the wage structure reveals a dual-track mechanism: elite credentials functioned as a screening device for higher entry wages, whereas intermediate schooling operated through steeper career progression. These findings suggest that the state successfully constructed a meritocratic internal labor market to generate the administrative capacity required for survival.

Central banks increasingly use social media to communicate beyond financial markets, yet evidence on public engagement effectiveness remains limited. Despite 113 central banks joining Twitter between 2008 and 2018, we lack understanding of what drives audience interaction with their content. To examine engagement determinants, we analysed 3.13 million tweets mentioning the Bank of England from 2007 to 2022, including 9,810 official posts. We investigate posting patterns, measure engagement elasticity, and identify content characteristics predicting higher interaction. The Bank's posting schedule misaligns with peak audience engagement times, with evening hours generating the highest interaction despite minimal posting. Cultural content, such as the Alan Turing £50 note, achieved 1,300 times higher engagement than routine policy communications. Engagement elasticity averaged 1.095 with substantial volatility during events like Brexit, contrasting with the Federal Reserve's stability. Media content dramatically increased engagement: videos by 1,700 per cent, photos by 126 per cent, while monetary policy announcements and readability significantly enhanced all metrics. Content quality and timing matter more than posting frequency for effective central bank communication. These findings suggest central banks should prioritise accessible, media-rich content during high-attention periods rather than increasing volume, with implications for digital communication strategies in fulfilling public transparency mandates.

The rapid growth of sustainable investing, now exceeding 35 trillion USD globally, has transformed financial markets, yet the implications for monetary policy transmission remain underexplored. While existing literature documents heterogeneous firm responses to monetary policy through traditional channels such as size and leverage, it remains unknown whether environmental, social, and governance (ESG) characteristics create distinct transmission mechanisms. Using high-frequency identification around 160 Federal Reserve announcements from 2005 to 2025, we uncover an asymmetric pattern: high-ESG firms gain 1.6 basis points of protection from contractionary target surprises, yet suffer 2.6 basis points greater sensitivity to forward guidance shocks. This asymmetry persists within industries and intensifies with investor climate awareness. Remarkably, the Paris Agreement inverted these relationships: before December 2015, high-ESG firms were more vulnerable to contractionary policy within industries; afterward, they gained protection, representing a 186 basis point reversal. We develop a two-period model featuring heterogeneous investors with sustainability preferences that quantitatively matches these patterns. The model reveals how ESG investors' non-pecuniary utility creates differential demand elasticities, simultaneously protecting green firms from immediate rate changes while amplifying forward guidance vulnerability through their longer investment horizons. These findings establish environmental characteristics as a new dimension of monetary policy non-neutrality, with important implications as sustainable finance continues expanding.

Can FOMC minutes, released three weeks after the meeting, still move markets? We extract a high-frequency surprise component from the minutes using text-as-data and benchmark it against standard monetary surprises, documenting a residual information channel beyond the statement itself.

This paper discusses and assesses Istanbul as an international finance centre within the context of its position in the sector of Islamic finance. No doubt, Istanbul is a centre of business and culture of Turkey and the Turkish government is at present endeavouring to turn Istanbul into a regional finance centre in ten years and, furthermore, into one of the top international financial centre in thirty years. In this context we evaluate Istanbul's potential and position to assume the role of a hub for Islamic finance. Our main conclusions are as follows; the current image, legal and regulatory infrastructure and human capacity of Istanbul do not presently allow it to become an international finance centre. In contrast, if we consider its strategic location standing between the Middle East, Eurasia and Africa as well as its strong relations with Muslim countries, and, last but not least, its strong banking system, Istanbul has the potential to serve as a centre for Islamic finance provided that the government's ambitions remain focused in this direction.

This research presented an empirical investigation of the determinants of the net interest margin in Turkish Banking sector with a particular emphasis on the bank ownership structure. This study employed a unique bank-level dataset covering Turkey's commercial banking sector for the 2001-2012. Our main results are as follows. Operation diversity, credit risk and operating costs are important determinants of margin in Turkey. More efficient banks exhibit lower margin and also price stability contributes to lower margin. The effect of principal determinants such as credit risk, bank size, market concentration and inflation vary across foreign-owned, state-controlled and private banks. At the same time, the impacts of implicit interest payment, operation diversity and operating cost are homogeneous across all banks.