Claeys, Grégory, Leandro, Álvaro, (2016), “The Juncker plan needs to be turned on its head”, Bruegel, 8 June The ‘Investment Plan for Europe’, also known as the Juncker Plan, was approved in June 2015 and the European Fund for Strategic Investments (EFSI) launched immediately after. The objective of the plan is to overcome the current lack of investment in the EU, but the initiative has got off to a disappointing start. Relevant …Read More
Wickens, Mike, (2016), “Avoiding another Eurozone Crisis while avoiding the Five Presidents’ Report: Part II”, Voxeu, 8 June This second column in a two-part series takes a closer look at the proposals in the Five Presidents’ Report for Fiscal, Banking, and Capital Markets Unions and much closer political integration among Eurozone countries. It goes on to give evidence of the failure of financial markets to price risk correctly prior to the …Read More
Rünstler, Gerhard, Vlekke, Marente, (2016), “Business, housing and credit cycles”, European Central Bank, No 1915 / June 2016 We use multivariate unobserved components models to estimate trend and cyclical components in GDP, credit volumes and house prices for the U.S. and the five largest European economies. With the exception of Germany, we find large and long cycles in credit and house prices, which are highly correlated with a medium-term component in GDP …Read More
Blanchard, Olivier, (2016), “How to Teach Intermediate Macroeconomics after the Crisis?”, Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2 June Having just concluded a seven-year run as chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, and having to rewrite the seventh edition of my undergraduate macroeconomics book (link is external) , I had to confront the issue: How should we teach macroeconomics to undergraduates after the crisis? Here are some of my conclusions (I …Read More
Wickens, Mike, (2016), “Avoiding another Eurozone Crisis while avoiding the Five Presidents’ Report: Part I”, Voxeu, 7 June European Monetary Union was designed to promote economic growth, price stability, full employment, and political integration. It can be argued that so far, it has achieved none of these and has in fact made things worse. The Five Presidents’ Report contained a set of proposals for making the single currency sustainable, based on …Read More
Countouris, Nicola, Koukiadaki, Aristea, (2016), “The Purpose Of European Labour Law: Floor Of Rights – Or Ceiling?”, Social Europe, 6 June The evocative aphorism that ‘on ne tombe pas amoureux d’un grand marché’ perfectly captures the mood of millions of Europeans in 2016. Jacques Delors was crucially aware of the strategic importance of Europe’s ‘social dimension’ in the process of European economic integration. Social rights, and labour rights in particular, talk to …Read More
De Grauwe, Paul, Ji, Yuemei, (2016), “Synchronisation in business cycles: An endogenous explanation”, Voxeu, 7 June There is a high degree of correlation between the business cycles of different countries. This is particularly the case in the Eurozone, but also among industrialised countries outside of the Eurozone. Using a two-country behavioural macroeconomic model, this column shows that the main channel for the synchronisation of business cycles is the propagation of ‘animal …Read More
Bibow, Jörg, (2016), “From Antigrowth Bias to Quantitative Easing”, Levy Economics Institute, June This paper investigates the European Central Bank’s (ECB) monetary policies. It identifies an antigrowth bias in the bank’s monetary policy approach: the ECB is quick to hike, but slow to ease. Similarly, while other players and institutional deficiencies share responsibility for the euro’s failure, the bank has generally done “too little, too late” with regard to managing the …Read More
Esther Ademmer, Ferdinand Drehe, (2016), “Constraining Political Budget Cycles: Media Strength and Fiscal Institutions in the Enlarged EU”, JCMS, Volume 54, Issue 3, May This article revisits institutional constraints to political budget cycles (PBCs) in the enlarged European Union (EU). Based on a panel of 25 Member States, we show that governments frequently fiscally stimulate the economy prior to elections. We argue that the occurrence of PBCs in the enlarged EU can be …Read More
Alexander Bick, Nicola Fuchs-Schündeln, David Lagakos, (2016), “How average hours worked varies with development: Cross-country evidence and implications”, Voxeu, 4 June The development accounting literature tries to account for cross-country output per worker differences by taking stock of inputs per worker. The data employed are often measured without great precision, however, making comparisons difficult. This column presents a new, internationally comparable dataset of average hours worked per adult across the world …Read More
