Central bank digital currency and systemic risk

Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) is an emerging Financial Technology (FinTech) area. Several countries are involved in CBDC development at different stages and a few are already in the launching stage. We use the autoregressive distributed lag approach to explore the association between CBDC-related news and systemic risk in the short and long run by employing dynamic panel heterogeneity analysis. The results show that CBDC-related news has a significant negative association with systemic risk in the long run, indicating a positive reception by the global financial sector. Extended analysis shows that the long-run negative association is consistent across different income levels and geographical regions. However, countries in the advanced stages of CBDC development show a significant positive association between CBDC-related news and systemic risk warranting the utmost care in implementing CBDC initiatives.