Moro, Andrea, Maresch, Daniela, Ferrando, Annalisa, Udell, Gregory F., (2017),  “Does employment protection legislation affect credit access? Evidence from Europe”, ECB, May We investigate the impact of employment protection on firms’ credit access by looking at both credit obtained from banks and firms’ decision to apply for a loan. We find that greater flexibility in structuring the employees’ working hours and in dismissing employees increases the probability that firms obtain …Read More

Wolff, Guntram B., (2017), “What could a euro-area finance minister mean?”, Bruegel, 17 May With the election of Emmanuel Macron as president of France, the idea of a euro-area treasury and finance minister is back in the limelight. The election programme of Emmanuel Macron calls for “a budget for the euro area voted by a euro-area parliament and executed by a euro-area finance minister” with the aim to “be able to …Read More

 Valderrama,, Laura, Sigmund, Michael, Schmitz, Stefan W., (2017), “Bank Solvency and Funding Cost : New Data and New Results”, IMF, 15 May This paper presents new evidence on the empirical relationship between bank solvency and funding costs. Building on a newly constructed dataset drawing on supervisory data for 54 large banks from six advanced countries over 2004–2013, we use a simultaneous equation approach to estimate the contemporaneous interaction between solvency and …Read More

 Kotz, Hans-Helmut, (2017), “Germany Will Lose if Macron Fails”, Project Syndicate, 15 May FRANKFURT – When Emmanuel Macron won the French presidential election, many Germans breathed a loud sigh of relief. A pro-European centrist had soundly defeated a far-right populist, the National Front’s Marine Le Pen. But if the nationalist threat to Europe is truly to be contained, Germany will have to work with Macron to address the economic challenges that …Read More

Ohnsorge, Franziska, Yu, Shu, (2017), “The Global Crisis watershed: Investment-less credit booms”, Vox Eu, 16 May Credit booms have often financed rapid investment growth, with investment subsequently stalling (Mendoza and Terrones 2012, Gorton and Ordonez 2016). However, after the Global Crisis, the nature of the relationship between credit and investment has changed. Specifically, credit to the nonfinancial private sector has risen rapidly in several several emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs), …Read More

Gholampour, Vahid, Wincoop, Eric van, (2017), “What we can learn from euro-dollar tweets”, Vox Eu, 15 May 2017 Research on the microstructure of foreign exchange (FX) has established the importance of private information for the determination of exchange rates. But private information is, by definition, unobservable. In social media, large numbers of people directly express their opinions about the direction of asset prices. Other studies, such as Antweiler and Frank (2004) and …Read More