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Monday, 14 October 2019
This year’s Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel has been awarded to three CEPR Fellows: Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer, for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.
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The sixth economist to be featured in the series is Ekaterina Zhuravskaya, Professor of Economics at the Paris School of Economics (EHESS). Ekaterina is also a Research Fellow of CEPR in our Public Policy and Development Economics programmes. |
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Friday, 4 October 2019
Matteo Maggiori, who is a CEPR Fellow in Financial Economics, is the 2019 recipient of the distinguished Carlo Alberto Medal.
CEPR is pleased to congratulate Matteo on this highly prestigious award. Established in 2007 by the Collegio Carlo Alberto, the Carlo Alberto Medal rewards an Italian scholar under the age of 40 for outstanding contributions to Economics.
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Patrick Honohan, Martin Sandbu
Patrick Honohan took over as governor of the Central Bank of Ireland in 2009 with the economy in meltdown, and steered it through its deepest crisis. His new book re-examines what happened, and lessons for future crises.
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Tara Rice, Kathryn Petralia
On 24 September the CEPR launched the latest Geneva Report on the world economy, called Banking disrupted? Financial intermediation in an era of transformational technology. Tim Phillips asks Tara Rice and Kathryn Petralia, two of the authors, whether fintechs and cryptocurrencies signal the beginning of the end for banks.
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Esther Duflo discusses how she has been involved in a number of experiments aimed at getting people to consume iron in various forms, but none of them have been entirely successful.
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Ekaterina Zhuravskaya discusses the link between middlemen minorities and the drivers of anti-Jewish violence in the Russian Empire.
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Eliana la Ferrara discusses her research on how to leverage the positive effects of racial diversity.
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Debate Moderators:
Antonio Fatás, Stephen Cecchetti
This debate aims to foster a conversation among academics and policymakers about the costs and benefits of some of the innovations and future scenarios for digital money.
Lead Commentaries:
World wide currency
Pierpaolo Benigno, Linda Schilling, Harald Uhlig
Libra paves the way for central bank digital currency
Dirk Niepelt
The benefits of a global digital currency
Antonio Fatás, Beatrice Weder di Mauro
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Debate Moderators:
Stephen Broadberry, Mark Harrison
Our aim is to use this debate to present recent research on the economics of the Second World War across a range of topics.
Lead Commentaries:
Exploitation and destruction in Nazi-occupied Europe, Hein Klemann
Economists at war, Alan Bollard
How the war was won, Phillips Payson O’Brien
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A new eBook addresses the challenges of ageing populations in terms of both individual and aggregate wellbeing, and highlights the options for countries and individuals to address those challenges.
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The provision of financial services is profoundly changing worldwide – so much so that many commentators are predicting the death of banking as we know it. The 22nd Geneva Report provides an overview of the rapid changes facing the industry and considers what banks must do to maintain their position of influence. |
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CEPR Policy Insight No 97
Alexandra D'Onofrio, Stefano Micossi, Fabrizia Peirce
One important conclusion of Robert Shiller's influential 2015 book, Irrational Exuberance, is that bubbles are random exogenous phenomena that cannot be foreseen and do not depend on macroeconomic policies. This CEPR Policy Insight throws light on the root causes of speculative fevers in asset markets and related financial booms and busts.
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CEPR Policy Insight No 96
Guillermo de la Dehesa
Populism has gained momentum over the past decade, dramatically changing the political landscape. This paper explains how deep recessions and immigration waves have contributed to this recent trend and discusses the likely trajectory of populism.
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Most read recent columns
Fabiano Schivardi, Tom Schmitz
1 October 2019
Productivity growth in southern Europe has been lower than in other developed countries. The column argues that this has in large part been caused by slow adoption of information technology, compounded by inefficient management. Without improvements in management practices, increased IT spending will not close the productivity gap.
Stefania Garetto, Lindsay Oldenski, Natalia Ramondo
8 October 2019
Multinational enterprises play an important role in coordinating production around the globe. This column presents a dynamic quantitative model of multinational enterprise expansion that can be used to analyse the effects of policies that affect the cost of the operations of such firms. It uses this model to estaimte the impact of potential implementations of Brexit.
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Fernando Eguren Martin, Matias Ossandon Busch, Dennis Reinhardt
8 October 2019
One of the markets banks use to fund lending in foreign currencies – namely, using FX swaps to fund FX lending synthetically – has seen large dislocations in its pricing since the Global Crisis. This column documents that such dislocations affect the supply of cross-border FX credit of UK-based banks. Access to foreign relatives matters as banks employ their internal capital markets to shield themselves from the effects, while banks outside the UK not affected by changes to synthetic funding costs are an important source of (partial) substitution.
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J Michelle Brock, Ralph De Haas
7 October 2019
Discrimination in access to financial services can prevent women from exploiting their entrepreneurial potential. This column reports on a lab-in-the-field experiment to test for the presence of gender discrimination in small business lending in Turkey. It finds that while unconditional loan approval rates are the same for male and female applicants, there exists a more subtle form of discrimination, with loan officers 30% more likely to make loan approval conditional on the presence of a guarantor when an application appears to come from a female instead of a male entrepreneur.
Jon Frost, Leonardo Gambacorta, Yi Huang, Hyun Song Shin, Pablo Zbinden
4 October 2019
BigTech firms are entering finance, and their access to massive amounts of information may give them an edge in areas like credit assessment and beyond. This column assesses the economic forces behind the adoption of Big Tech services in finance. It shows that BigTech lenders thrive in countries with less competitive banks and less strict regulation, and that they have an information advantage from the use of big data and machine learning.
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Bradford DeLong
10 October 2019
Brad DeLong asks whether a society where some 30 million workers are essentially paid, directly or indirectly, by the top 0.1% can be a healthy one.
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Friday, 27 September 2019
In September the €-coin indicator decreased again (to 0.16, from 0.18 in August) but remained at levels that are compatible with a modest expansion in economic activity in the euro area.
The indicator continues to be held back by the persistent weakness of the industrial cycle and the trends in business confidence, especially in the manufacturing sector.
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Research Affiliate, Economic History, Industrial Organization, Public Economics, CEPR
Assistant Professor of Economics, Department of Economics, Sciences Po Paris
Research focus:
- I am particularly interested in media economics, political participation and political attitudes. In my recent research, I scrutinize contemporary democracy and investigate the role of money in politics.
What is your biggest achievement to date – personal or professional?
- A number of media organizations in France are moving towards a new non-profit status and democratizing their governance. These are ideas I have defended since Saving the Media. Of course, I am not the only one to defend these ideas, but it's nice to see that research may matter!
What advice would you give to young aspiring economists?
- Never think in terms of fields, but always work on research questions you are interested in! You need to be convinced that the topic your are working on matters. You need to be passionate by the questions you tackle! This is how you will do good research.
What one book would you recommend?
- I would recommend many books and, as a rule, I think we should encourage young aspiring economists to read many more books than they used to read (and also to write books!). It's hard to pick just one. Recently, I enjoyed reading Just Giving: Why Philanthropy is Failing Democacy and How It Can Do Better by Rob Reich and The Cash Ceiling by Nicholas Carnes.
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DP14016 A Crash Course on the Euro Crisis
DP14010 Public Debt Sustainability
DP14012 Finance and Carbon Emissions
DP13987 The Political Economy of a Diverse Monetary Union
DP13996 Political Effects of the Internet and Social Media
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Markus K Brunnermeier, Ricardo Reis
The financial crises of the last twenty years brought new economic concepts into classroom discussions. This article introduces undergraduate students and teachers to seven of these models: (i) misallocation of capital inflows, (ii) modern and shadow banks, (iii) strategic complementarities and amplification, (iv) debt contracts and the distinction between solvency and liquidity, (v) the diabolic loop, (vi) regional flights to safety, and (vii) unconventional monetary policy. We apply each of them to provide a full account of the euro crisis of 2010-12.
Xavier Debrun, Jonathan D. Ostry, Tim Willems, Charles Wyplosz
Why can Japan sustain debts above 200 percent of GDP, while Ukraine defaulted on its debt when it was 30 percent of GDP? Answering that question is challenging. First, debt sustainability does not easily translate into operational concepts and indicators. Second, servicing the debt is a strategic decision, the result of a cost-benefit analysis. Thus markets can always, for good or bad reasons, question governments' commitment to face their financial obligations. Third, uncertainty around public debt developments is large and difficult to model. Fourth, not all debts are born equal, as the currency composition, maturity structure, type of creditor and ownership of the debt affect exposure to rollover and liquidity risks. The paper surveys the knowns and unknowns of debt sustainability, including the tools helping us to understand vulnerabilities and to inform our judgment. Instead of embarking on the impossible mission to build a holistic, consistent and broadly-accepted debt-sustainability framework for practitioners, we take the more modest approach to review some of the key economic principles and statistical methods that form today's leading practice in debt sustainability assessments.
Ralph de Haas, Alexander Popov
We study the relation between financial structure and carbon emissions in a large panel of countries and industries. For given levels of economic and financial development, emissions per capita are lower in economies that are relatively more equity-funded. Industry-level analysis reveals two channels. First, deeper stock markets reallocate investment towards cleaner industries and, second, they allow carbon-intensive industries to produce green patents and reduce their energy intensity. Only one-tenth of these industry-level reductions in domestic emissions is offset by increased carbon embedded in imports. A firm-level analysis of an exogenous shock to the cost of equity in Belgium confirms our findings.
We analyze the political economy of monetary unification among countries with different quality of institutions. Countries with stronger institutions have lower public spending and better investment incentives, even under a stronger currency. Governments under weaker institutions spend more so must occasionally devalue. In a MU market prices and flows adjust quickly but institutional differences persist, so a diverse monetary union (DMU) has many redistributive effects. The government in the weaker country expand spending and investment may be reduced by the fiscal and common exchange rate effect. Strong country production benefits from the weaker currency but needs to offer fiscal support in a fiscal crisis, a transfer legitimized by its ex ante devaluation gain. Some governments may join a DMU even if it depresses productive capacity to expand public spending. Even in a DMU beneficial for all countries, workers and firms in weaker countries and savers in stronger countries may lose.
DP13996 Political Effects of the Internet and Social Media
Ruben Enikolopov, Maria Petrova, Ekaterina Zhuravskaya
How do the internet and social media affect political outcomes? We review empirical evidence from the recent political economy literature focusing especially on the work that considers those features that distinguish the internet and social media from traditional offline media, such as low barriers to entry and reliance on user-generated content. We discuss the main results about the effects of the internet, in general, and social media, in particular, on voting, street protests, attitudes toward government, political polarization, xenophobia, and politicians' behavior. We also review evidence on the role of social media in the dissemination of false news and summarize results about the strategies employed by autocratic regimes to censor internet and to use social media for surveillance and propaganda. We conclude by highlighting the key open questions about how the internet and social media shape politics in democracies and autocracies.
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