At the 25th anniversary of the Maastricht Treaty, this paper reviews the merits of introducing a safe sovereign asset for the eurozone. The triple euro area crisis showed the costly consequences of ignoring the "safety trilemma". Keeping a national safe sovereign asset (the German bund) as the...

Euro area governments have committed to break the doom loop between bank risk and sovereign risk. But policymakers have not reached consensus on whether and how to reform the regulatory treatment of banks' sovereign exposures. To inform policy discussions, this paper simulates portfolio...

We study determinants of sovereign portfolios of Spanish banks over a long time-span, starting in 2008. Our findings challenge the view that banks engaged in moral hazard strategies to exploit the regulatory treatment of sovereign exposures. In particular, we show that being a weakly capitalized...

In contrast to developed countries, developing nations are especially reliant on trade taxes, particularly tariffs, as a source of government revenue. As such, tariff liberalization provides them with an incentive to switch towards other revenue generating trade barriers such as anti-dumping...

The paper looks at two aspects of the Covid-19 pandemic. These are (i) the nature of this event and its implication for evaluating past policy and policy into the future, and (ii) the suitability of proposed changes in the implementation of competition policy affecting firm behaviour, market...