White Papers
The Research Behavior of Individual Investors- Toomas Laarits & Jeffrey Wurgler
March 31, 2025--Browser data from an approximately representative sample of individual investors offers a detailed account of their search for information, including how much time they spend on stock research, which stocks they research, what categories of information they seek, and when they gather information relative to events and trades. The median individual investor spends approximately six minutes on research per trade on traded tickers, mostly just before the trade; the mean spends around half an hour.
Individual investors spend the most time reviewing price charts, followed by analyst opinions, and exhibit little interest in traditional risk statistics. Aggregate research interest is highly correlated with stock size, and salient news and earnings announcements draw more attention. Individual investors have different research styles, and those that focus on short-term information are more likely to trade more speculative stocks.
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Source: nber.org
Could Digital Currencies Lead to the Disappearance of Cash from the Market?
March 21, 2025-Summary
Private and public agents' plans and actions to introduce digital currencies and other innovative payment instruments could produce some unintended consequences, including the potential disappearance of physical cash. This study employs a two-sided market model to examine how payment systems might respond to new currencies.
Numerical simulations indicate that the success of a new currency hinges on a large-scale launch. However, even unsuccessful attempts could disrupt existing systems, potentially resulting in the elimination of cash. If cash plays a critical role as a safeguard, regulatory and monetary authorities should give due consideration to ensure its continued availability when payment innovations are introduced.
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Source: imf.org
IMF Note-Fund Investor Types and Bond Market Volatility
March 12, 2025-Summary
This note explores the connection between the varied investor profiles of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and open-ended mutual funds (OEMFs) and the return volatility of the securities they hold. Based on the security-level data of US ETF and OEMF holdings, the analysis suggests that, on aggregate, a higher ETF ownership share may be associated with lower bond return volatility.
This paper explores the similarities and differences of tokens with traditional legal instruments in commercial law and how tokens could offer superior solutions, provided that proper legal foundations are established for their operation, including aspects of the law of securities and consumer protection law.
However, there is a stark divergence between the behavior of institutional and retail ETF investors and their impact on the underlying market. When a larger share of a bond is owned by institutional investors through ETFs, its volatility tends to be higher. Conversely, retail investors tend to offset this impact of institutional investors. This disparity is not evident for OEMFs.
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Source: imf.org
IMF Working Paper-Not all Housing Cycles are Created Equal: Macroeconomic Consequences of Housing Booms
February 28, 2025-Summary
Summary
This paper shows that not all housing price cycles are alike. The nature of the housing expansion phase-especially whether a housing price boom characterized by rapid and persistent house price growth is present-plays a key role in shaping the severity of the subsequent contraction, and the net macroeconomic impact over the full cycle.
Analyzing 180 housing expansions across 68 countries, we classify 49 percent as housing booms, characterized by rapid and persistent real house price increases. We find that economic downturns are significantly deeper and longer when housing contractions are preceded by a housing boom. The housing contraction is more severe the more intensive the preceding housing boom, and when accompanied by a credit boom. Overall, while housing booms spur stronger economic growth during the expansion phase, their sharp reversals lead to severe housing contractions, resulting in significant net negative effects on the real economy.
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Source: imf.org
Pension Reform and Stock Market Development
February 28, 2025-Summary
We highlight the strong connection between developing fully-funded, individually-owned, collectively-managed, mandatory/incentivized (FICMI) pension schemes and the development of domestic stock markets. We do so by building a stylized model and complementing the analysis with cross-country empirical analysis and case studies.
We also highlight the challenges of individual impatience, network externalities, and coordination failure in long-term equity investments, which are crucial for stock market development and technological innovation.
We find that FICMI pension schemes-when sufficiently wide in coverage and large in size-can serve as coordination devices to support long-term equity investments. Such investments will not only promote domestic stock market development and make it easier for firms to raise long-term equity capital, therefore supporting long-term economic growth, but also enhance financial inclusion and enable more households to benefit from the overall economic development, therefore contributing to inclusive growth. Moreover, we find that the introduction of FICMI pension schemes can impact household savings in two ways: first, FICMI pension can increase household savings through "forced/incentivized" savings channel, where households save too little without FICMI pension (such as in many EMDEs); and second, FICMI pension can decrease household savings and increase household consumption by reducing non-pension savings and decreasing precautionary savings, where households save too much without FICMI pension (such as in China). In both cases, FICMI pension schemes can help move the economy closer to the optimal level of household savings, and may also help improve the structure of such savings. Finally, we discuss the enabling conditions (such as a strong political commitment to the reform and a well-designed fiscal strategy for financing the transition) and policy design for FICMI pension schemes.
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Source: imf.org
IMF Working Paper-Understanding the Macroeconomic Effects of Natural Disasters
February 21, 2025-Summary
Climate change is causing more frequent and devastating natural disasters. The goal of this paper is two-fold. First, it examines the dynamic effects of natural disasters on the growth of output and its components. Government expenditure in advanced economies (AEs) rises immediately in the same year of the natural disaster, offsetting the decline in private investment growth and thereby mitigating the negative effect on output growth.
As a result, output growth in AEs is not significantly affected by natural disasters. In contrast, the increase in government expenditure in emerging markets and developing countries (EMDEs) after a natural disaster is smaller and thus, unable to mitigate the contemporaneous negative effect on output growth (which mainly reflects the fall in investment in non-small-island EMDEs and in net exports in small-island EMDEs). In addition, the output recovery in the subsequent year does not fully offset the decline during the year of the disaster. Second, this paper assesses the role of pre-existing country characteristics in mitigating the adverse impact of natural disasters. The paper finds that small islands and countries with limited pre-disaster fiscal space tend to experience more significant declines in output growth following a natural disaster.
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Source: imf.org
IMF Working Paper-Prometheus Unbound: What Makes Fintech Grow?
February 21, 2025-Summary
The rise of financial technologies-fintech-could have transformative effects on the financial landscape, expanding the reach of services beyond the confines of geography and creating new competitive sources of finance for households and firms. But what makes fintech grow? Why do some countries have more financial innovation than others?
In this paper, I use a comprehensive dataset to investigate the emergence and spread of fintech in a diverse panel of 98 countries over the period 2012-2020.
This empirical analysis helps ascertain economic, demographic, technological and institutional factors that enable the development of fintech. The magnitude and statistical significance of these factors vary according to the type of fintech instrument and the level of economic development (advanced economies vs. developing countries). Finally, these findings reveal that policies and structural reforms can help promote financial innovation and cultivate fintech ventures-particularly by strengthening technological and institutional infrastructures and reducing cybersecurity threats.
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Source: imf.org
White Paper-Monetary Policy Predicts Currency Movements
February 9, 2025--Abstract
The relative restrictiveness of a central bank's supply of money predicts the raw and risk-adjusted returns of its currency-both next month and at least three years into the future.
Archived data, known by currency traders at the time, estimates central bank restrictiveness as a scaling of the residual from out-of-sample panel regressions of M1 on macroeconomic variables tied to domestic and international transaction requirements. Carry's ability to forecast currency returns is subsumed by the central bank restrictiveness signal, which also forecasts inflation.
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Source: ssrn.com
Social Security Reforms, Retirement and Sectoral Decisions
January 31, 2025--Summary
In many countries, the regulations governing pension systems, hiring procedures, and job contracts differ between the public and private sectors. Public sector employees tend to have longer tenures and higher wages compared to workers in the private sector.
As such, social security reforms can affect both retirement decisions and sectoral choices. We study the effects of social security reforms on retirement and sectoral behavior in an economy with multiple pension systems.
We develop a general equilibrium life-cycle model with heterogeneous agents, three sectors - private formal, private informal and public - and endogenous retirement. We quantitatively assess the long-run effects of reforms being discussed and implemented around the world. Among them, we study the unification of pension systems and increasing the minimum retirement age. We calibrate our model to Brazil, where several of the retirement conditions resemble those of other countries. We find that these reforms lower the likelihood of individuals to apply to a public job and increase the profile of savings over the life cycle. In the long run, these reforms lead to higher output and capital, reduced informality, and average welfare gains. They also drastically reduce the social security deficit.
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Source: imf.org
IMF Working Paper-Tokenization and Financial Market Inefficiencies
January 29, 2025--Summary
Most financial assets are digital today. Tomorrow, they may be tokenized. Tokenization implies recording and transferring assets on a widely shared and trusted digital ledger that can be programmed. Interest in tokenization is strong and experiments abound, but what are the consequences of this new trend for financial markets?
This note introduces a taxonomy and a conceptual framework centered on market inefficiencies to evaluate this question. Some inefficiencies could decline across the asset life cycle. Others would remain, however, and new ones could emerge. Issuing, servicing, and redeeming assets might involve fewer intermediaries and thus become cheaper. The costs of trading assets may also decrease as tokenization lowers some counterparty risks and search frictions and offers flexibility in settlement. Additionally, greater competition among brokers could lower transaction fees.
However, tokenization may amplify shocks if it induces institutions to become more interconnected and hold lower liquidity buffers or higher leverage, potentially jeopardizing financial stability. Programs themselves may introduce new risks related to strings of contingent contracts or faulty code. While competition may grow among financial intermediaries, the provision of market infrastructure could become more concentrated due to network effects.
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Source: imf.org
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