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

Kriesi, Hanspeter, (2017), “The implications of the euro crisis for democracy”, Journal of European Public Policy, 28 April The question of whether European democracy is in crisis is not new, but is posed in a new way in the shadow of the euro crisis. In the tradition of the studies of democratic support and disaffection and based on data from the European Social Survey 2012, this article analyses the conceptions and …Read More

Bignon, Vincent, Jobst, Clemens, (2017), “The real economic benefits of easy central bank access: Evidence from the Great French Wine Blight”, Vox Eu, 30 April Who should have access to central bank refinancing and which assets should be eligible for central bank operations? As the Bank for International Settlements recently noted in 2013 and 2015, the answers to these questions vary widely among central banks (BIS 2013, BIS-CGFS 2015). Some …Read More