Reducing the compliance costs of regulation
In much of the world, property sales are highly regulated and expensive. Using World Bank data, this column shows that while regulators and...
Opinion Pieces
CEPS/ECMI Policy Brief – Why finalizing Basel III is good for the European banking sector
Basel III is an internationally agreed set of measures to strengthen the regulation, supervision and risk management of banks. Finalising the 2017...
SUERF Policy Brief – The way forward for EU-wide stress tests
EU-wide stress tests have constituted a very useful supervisory tool for increasing the resilience of the EU banking sector. This policy brief claims...
Moral hazard, the fear of the markets, and how central banks responded to Covid-19
While the direct economic consequences of Covid-19 have been significant, the impact on the financial markets has been more nuanced. This column uses...
Vaccine challenges
Last week brought welcome news about the apparent effectiveness of a potential Covid-19 vaccine. While the challenges of manufacturing and...
Financial policymaking after crises: Public versus private interest
Financial crises invariably lead governments to intervene in one way or another, whether to ease the damage to middle-class voters, to respond to the...
How we learned to stop counting cases and worry about network effects instead
The commuter hub was key to the spread of COVID-19 in London. The authors of the article estimate it contributed to over 42% of all London cases. When...
The great demographic reversal and what it means for the economy
The ageing of the population has implications for inequality, productivity and monetary and fiscal policy, write Charles Goodhart and Manoj Pradhan
Firms in emerging markets fall to COVID-19
Young, small, and domestic market-oriented firms are more likely to fall into financial distress.
Which programming language is best for economic research: Julia, Matlab, Python or R?
The most widely used programming languages for economic research are Julia, Matlab, Python and R. This column uses three criteria to compare the...
Support for small businesses amid COVID-19
A sizeable proportion of enterprises, especially SMEs, in receipt of financial assistance from the government will fail to repay. This column asks...
Time inconsistency in recent monetary policy
A decade of near-zero, and even negative, interest rates in advanced economies has both encouraged the continued accumulation of debt and a search for...
Coronavirus panic fuels a surge in cash demand
Despite regular reports in the media over the past decade on the imminent death of cash amid rapid innovation in payment technologies, cash in...
Finance and politics: New insights
A rapidly expanding literature has shown the importance of political economy factors for legislative and regulatory actions in the financial sector...
The neighbourhood effect of reforms after crises
Countries reform when their neighbours have reformed too, especially in the aftermath of economic crises. This column examines business regulatory...
The political scar of epidemics
What will be the political legacy of the COVID-19 pandemic? This column uses data from the 2006-2018 Gallup World Polls to show that epidemic exposure...
