Welcome to the Consumerist Archives Thanks for visiting Consumerist.com. As of October 2017, Consumerist is no longer producing new content, but feel free to browse through our archives. Here you can find 12 years worth…

Despite the rapid expansion of internet access to households around the world, there are large disparities in children’s access to internet at home. Over 95% of 15-year-old students in OECD member countries report having a…

Much of the allure surrounding Bitcoin and related cryptocurrencies stems from the facts that no government is needed to issue them, and they can be held and traded without a bank account. Instead, they are…

Firm financing in bank-based and market-based financial systems after the Global Crisis The past few decades have witnessed increasing influence of the financial sector on the broader economy. Finance supports investments, increases the productive capacity…

On 29 October 1917 (16 October in the old Russian calendar), Sergei Prokopovich, the Russian minister of food procurement, had to acknowledge in public that there was little or no grain in government storage to…

Real interest rates on safe assets such as government bonds have declined persistently since the 1980s. This price change signals that the demand for safe assets outstrips the supply, and it has significant implications for…

Excessive credit growth and leverage have been identified as key drivers of the Global Crisis and many other episodes of financial instability (Borio and Lowe 2002, Schularick and Taylor 2012). Recent research has shown that…

The Global Crisis brought attention to connections among financial institutions, in particular whether they make systems more prone to crises, how they do so, and what spillovers they may have to the macroeconomy. Researchers have…