Jens Weidmann: It’s ‘Illusion’ to Think Euro Bonds Will Fix Crisis
Europe Channel: Latest Posts
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Europe
Credit crisis is a missed opportunity to restructure European financial supervision
by Roel Beetsma (University of Amsterdam, CEPR, CESifo) and Sylvester Eijffinger (Tilburg University, CEPR, CESifo) Although the current credit crisis has (so far) only had a limited impact on the European financial sector, there is still a need to restructure European financial sector supervision. Currently, the responsibility for financial supervision is at the national level. [...]
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Europe
Rules versus Discretion and Managing Financial Sector Stress
with Michael Moore and Ian Tower Economic policies are increasingly subject to rules-based frameworks, except perhaps in the financial sector. A growing number of countries conduct their fiscal policies within a rules-based framework that features expenditure, deficit, or debt targets. In many economies, monetary policy is set as a function of forecast and targeted inflation, [...]
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Europe
EMU, inequality, and finance
Feelings of economic insecurity play an important role in slowing down the European integration process. In the early 2000s, Europeans were certainly troubled by the worldwide cyclical downswing, by competition from newly industrializing trading partners, by slow adoption of new technologies. But public opinion and voters in European Constitution referenda have found it easiest to [...]
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Europe
Private Equity Regulation: a lesson from Italy
Private equity (PE) in Europe smashed all records in 2006 following a rising trend where the highest number of European buyouts since 1999 has been reached. The number of transactions has declined slightly, from 1,115 in 2004, to 1,100 in 2006, but the total value of these transactions has increased by 40% in the last [...]
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Europe
The vanishing bequest tax
Bequest tax revenues have been constantly declining in all OECD countries for at least seventy years. Recent policy debate and legislative proposals, in countries such as the US, the UK, France, and Italy, are signaling a further acceleration of the decline of this tax. As I have argued in recent editorials in vox and la [...]
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Europe
Too Old To Work, Too Young To Retire?
in collaboration with Guido Schwerdt (schwerdt@ifo.de), Rudolf Winter Ebmer (Rudolf.WinterEbmer@jku.at) and Josef Zweimuller (zweim@iew.unizh.ch) French President Nicolas Sarkozy had to strike a special deal with the train drivers in order to alleviate recent strikes by French rail workers protesting against increasing their minimum retirement age. Similar debates arose in Italy when the former government wanted [...]
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Europe
EMU@10 – the Irish Experience
EMU at 10: The Irish Experience May 2008 marks the tenth anniversary of the decision to move to the third and final stage of EMU, with the list of member countries finalised and a commitment to launch the euro on January 1st 1999. This has been marked by the European Commission with the publication of [...]
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Europe
Can we predict exchange rates? Economic evidence against the random walk model
The forward premium, the difference between the forward exchange rate and the spot exchange rate, contains economically valuable information about the future of exchange rates. Here is the evidence that it can help predict short-run rates and that investors who ignore it and use random walk models may be leaving money on the table. Exchange [...]
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Europe
Innovation after Lisbon: New ideas for innovation policies in Europe
Life after Lisbon has been disappointing for Europe. The aim to turn Europe into the most competitive knowledge based economy of the world has remained vague, with results far off the mark. Equally poor have been the outcomes of European Union efforts in 2005 to give the Lisbon strategy a new start, trying to combine [...]
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Europe
The Achilles heel of the EMU: the labour markets
Recent diverging labour cost developments among EMU countries, affecting the trade and inflation position of each country, raise some doubts regarding the equal distribution of costs and benefits of shocks among the member countries and, hence, the long term stability of the Euro. The common factor that holds a currency union together is definitely risk [...]
