SUMMARY Pablo Zbinden?>We consider the drivers and implications of the growth of ‘BigTech’ in finance – i.e. the financial services offerings of technology companies with established presence in the market for digital services. BigTech firms often start with payments. Thereafter, some expand into the provision of credit, insurance and money management products, either directly or in cooperation with financial institution partners. Focusing on credit, we show that BigTech firms lend more in countries with less competitive banking sectors and less stringent bank regulation. Analysing the case of Argentina, we find support for the hypothesis that BigTech lenders, by acquiring a vast amount of non-traditional information, have an advantage in credit assessment relative to a traditional credit bureau. They also serve unbanked borrowers, and may have an advantage in contract enforcement. It is too early to judge the extent of BigTech’s eventual advance into the provision of financial services. However, the early evidence allows us to pose pertinent questions that bear on their impact on financial stability and overall economic welfare.

A publish/subscribe system dynamically routes and delivers events from sources to interested users, and is an extremely useful communication service when it is not clear in advance who needs what information. In this paper we discuss how a publish/subscribe system can be extended to operate in a mobile environment, where events can be generated by moving sensors or users, and subscribers can request delivery at handheld and/or mobile devices. We describe how the publish/subscribe system itself can be distributed across multiple (possibly mobile) computers to distribute load, and how the system can be replicated to cope with failures, message loss, and disconnections.

In China, between 2006 and 2013, local public debt crowded out the investment of private firms by tightening their funding constraints while leaving state-owned firms' investment unaffected. We establish this result using a purpose-built data set for Chinese local public debt. Private firms invest less in cities with more public debt, with the reduction in investment larger for firms located farther from banks in other cities or more dependent on external funding. Moreover, in cities where public debt is high, private firms' investment is more sensitive to internal cash flow. IN CHINA, LOCAL GOVERNMENT DEBT almost quadrupled from 5.8% to 22% of GDP over the 2006 to 2013 period. This increase in local public debt was due largely to the fiscal stimulus program carried out after 2008, worth US$590 billion, together with much-reduced reliance on central government debt and transfers to local governments. Based on a novel, purpose-built database on the public debt of prefecture-level Chinese cities from 2006 to 2013, we show that the increase in local public debt crowded out private investment in the

On March 22, 2018, Trump proposed to impose tariffs on up to $50 billion of Chinese imports leading to a significant concern over the "Trade War" between the US and China. We evaluate the market responses to this event for firms in both countries, depending on their direct and indirect exposures to US-China trade. US firms that are more dependent on exports to and imports from China have lower stock and bond returns but higher default risks in the short time window around the announcement date. We also find that firms' indirect exposure to US-China trade through domestic input-output linkages affects their responses to the announcement. These findings suggest that the structure of US-China trade is much more complex than the simplistic view of global trade that engendered Trump's "Trade War" against China.