Laidi, Zaki, (2017), “France Returns to Europe”, Project Syndicate, 10 Μαΐου For starters, Macron’s victory represents a break from the populist wave that has swept across Europe. Since the United Kingdom’s Brexit referendum and US President Donald Trump’s election last year, populism has posed an existential threat to the European Union. And while Macron’s victory does not mean that the populist threat has been eliminated, it does show that such …Read More

Boenke, Timm, Grabka, Markus M., Schroeder, Carsten, Wolff, Edward, (2017), “The role of social security wealth in international comparisons of household wealth: A head-to-head comparison of augmented wealth in Germany and the US”, Vox Eu, 10 May While wealth inequalities have received some attention, most academic, political, and public debates focus on inequalities in income. Concerning private wealth and international comparisons of wealth inequalities, research usually investigates the distributions of …Read More

 Emmott, Bill, (2017), “The Wages of Wage Fear”, Project Syndicate, 10 May LONDON – If all else fails, try the previously unthinkable. It is not a bad principle for economic policy in the best of times. Today, it may be just what is needed: many Western countries – certainly the United States, Japan, and Germany, probably the United Kingdom, and soon much of the rest of the eurozone – should …Read More

Beck, Thorsten, De Jonghe, Olivier, Mulier, Klaas, (2017), “Sectoral concentration and bank performance: New measures and new evidence”, Vox Eu, 9 May Concentration of bank assets is one of the most important factors contributing to systemic banking risk. According to a 2004 Basel Committee study, credit concentration in banks caused nine of the 13 major banking crises around the world in the 20th century (Westernhagen et al. 2004). Bank asset concentration …Read More

 Abrahamian, Atossa Araxia, (2017),  “The Rock-Star Appeal of Modern Monetary Theory”, THENation, 8 May Ιn early 2013, Congress entered a death
 struggle—or a debt struggle, if you will—over the future of the US economy. A spate of old tax cuts and spending programs were due to expire almost simultaneously, and Congress couldn’t agree on a budget, nor on how much the government could borrow to keep its engines running. Cue the …Read More

Georgescu, Oana-Maria, Gross, Marco, Kapp, Daniel, Kok, Christoffer, (2017), “Do stress tests matter? Evidence from the 2014 and 2016 stress tests”, ECB, May 2017 Stress tests have been increasingly used in recent years by regulators to foster con- fidence in the banking sector by not only increasing its resilience via mandatory capital increases but also by enhancing transparency to allow investors to better discriminate between banks. In this study, using an …Read More

Merler, Silvia,Schoenmaker, Dirk, Véron, Nicolas, (2017), “How will Europe’s banking system respond to future challenges?”, Bruegel, 5 May This episode of The Sound of Economics focuses on the banking system in Europe and some of the challenges it is facing. The financial crisis made it clear that more should be done to create conditions for a safer financial system. The EU has taken measures to do that, and one of …Read More

Andersson, Fredrik, Jonung, Lars, (2017), “Inflation targets and the benefits of an explicit tolerance band”, Vox Eu,8 May Since the early 1990s, a large number of central banks have adopted inflation targeting, with the operational goal for monetary policy commonly set as a single number. The official target for inflation is often combined with an explicit tolerance band within which inflation is allowed to fluctuate. In a recent survey, Hammond (2012) …Read More