The euro crisis was fueled by the diabolic loop between sovereign risk and bank risk, coupled with cross-border flight-to-safety capital flows. European Safe Bonds (ESBies), a union-wide safe asset without joint liability, would help to resolve these problems. We make three contributions. First,...

Industrial production in G7 countries is assumed to be driven by two exogenous disturbances. Those disturbances are identified in a VAR model so they can be interpreted as countryspecific and global supply shocks. The dynamic properties of the model are analyzed and the relative importance of...

We investigate into the role of the trade channel as important determinant of a country's current account position and the degree of business cycle synchronization with the rest of the world by comparing the predictions of two types of DGE models. It is shown that the behavior of a country's...

Speculators often advertise arbitrage opportunities in order to persuade other investors and thus accelerate the correction of mispricing. We show that in order to minimize the risk and the cost of arbitrage an investor who identifies several mispriced assets optimally advertises only one of...

Has economic research been helpful in dealing with the financial crises of the early 2000s? On the whole, the answer is negative, although there are bright spots. Economists have largely failed to predict both crises, largely because most of them were not analytically equipped to understand...

We study a model where some investors ("hedgers") are bad at information processing, while others ("speculators") have superior information-processing ability and trade purely to exploit it. The disclosure of financial information induces a trade externality: if speculators refrain from trading,...

This paper distils three lessons for bank regulation from the experience of the 2009-12 euro-area financial crisis. First, it highlights the key role that sovereign debt exposures of banks have played in the feedback loop between bank and fiscal distress, and inquires how the regulation of...

We investigate the determinants of firms' implicit insurance to employees, using a difference-indifference approach: we rely on differences between family and non-family firms to identify the supply of insurance, and exploit variation in unemployment insurance across and within countries to...

In China, between 2006 and 2013, local public debt crowded out the investment of private firms by tightening their funding constraints, while leaving state-owned firms' investment unaffected. We establish this result using a purpose-built dataset for Chinese local public debt. Private firms...

Arbitrageurs with a short investment horizon gain from accelerating price discovery by advertising their private information. However, advertising many assets may overload investors' attention, reducing the number of informed traders per asset and slowing price discovery. So arbitrageurs...