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Remittance inflows are driven by macroeconomic conditions in the home and the host economies, respectively. In this paper, we study the effect of US monetary policy on remittance flows into economies in Latin American and the Caribbean. The role of Fed policy for remittances has not yet been studied. We estimate a series of panel local projections for remittance inflows into eight countries. A surprise change in US monetary conditions has a strong and highly significant negative effect on inflows. Our finding remains robust if we change the sample period or include additional variables. Hence, our paper establishes a remittance-channel through which the Fed affects the business cycle abroad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The personalities of central bankers moved center stage during the recent financial crisis. Indeed, several central bankers even became 'superstars. ' In this article, we investigate whether superstar central bankers have an impact on economic performance. We employ school grades given to central bankers by the financial press, defining as superstars those central bankers receiving the top grade. First, we explain the grades in a probit estimation with measures of economic performance, institutional features, and personal characteristics. Second, we employ a matching approach to account for the endogeneity of grading with respect to economic performance. Using entropy balancing, we identify credible counterfactuals for top-graded central bankers, that is, nonsuperstar central bankers who face similar situations. Comparing the economic performance of both groups, we find that superstars do indeed matter: a top-graded central banker faces a significantly more favorable output-inflation tradeoff than his peers. This effect is driven by outstanding central bankers in both advanced and emerging economies and is especially prevalent in the precrisis subsample. (JEL E52, E58), 'You've heard of an international market for superstar soccer players. We need an international market for superstar central bankers.' Matthew O'Brien, April 19, 2012. (1) I. INTRODUCTION On November 26, [...]

In modern photovoltaic (PV) systems such as bifacial and building‐integrated PV, a big share of sunlight impinges at large incident angles on the air‐to‐glass module interface. These designs exceedingly call for effective omnidirectional antireflective (AR) measures. Texturing of PV cover glasses can effectively mitigate reflection losses in a broad spectral and angular range. Numerous individual textures have been presented in the literature; however, the lack of consistent material stacks hinders a comparative evaluation. Herein, UV‐nanoimprint lithography is used to fabricate and analyze 12 different artificial and bioreplicated textures from nano‐ to mesoscale on glass. The angle‐resolved reflectance is examined for incident angles from 5° to 80° and analyzed the scattering properties. For example, the effect of the investigated textures on the annual energy yield is calculated for a tilted bifacial PV module located in Berlin, Germany. While well‐known moth‐eye nanostructures exhibit excellent AR behavior near‐normal incidence, their shallow angle performance is often not reported. The best‐performing textures exhibit features on microscale and a large surface enhancement factor, increasing the annual energy yield up to 5% when compared to nontextured devices. The results give clear design guidelines for textured glasses of future PV applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we study the impact of the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic in estimated panel vector autoregression models for 92 countries. The large cross‐section of countries allows us to shed light on the heterogeneity of the responses of stock markets and nitrogen dioxide emissions as high‐frequency measures of economic activity. We quantify the effect of the number of infections and four dimensions of policy measures: (1) containment and closure, (2) movement restrictions, (3) economic support, and (4) adjustments of health systems. Our main findings show that a surprise increase in the number of infections triggers a drop in our two measures of economic activity. Propping up economic support measures, in contrast, raises stock returns and emissions and, thus, contributes to the economic recovery. We also document vast differences in the responses across subsets of countries and between the first and the second wave of infections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]