Bentolila, Samuel, Dolado , Juan, (2017), “Social Europe revisited”, Vox Eu, 23 May Almost 20 years ago, the eighth CEPR Monitoring European Integration report explored the interactions between social policy, broadly interpreted, and economic integration in Europe. The experience of the past enlargement of the European Community to include Greece, Portugal, and Spain from the early to the mid-1980s provided Social Europe: One for All? (Bean, Bentolila, Bertola, and Dolado, 1998) …Read More

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

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