This note weighs the merits of a capital market union (CMU) for Europe, identifies major obstacles in its path, and recommends a set of carefully targeted policy actions. European capital markets are relatively small, resulting in strong bank-dependence, and are split sharply along national...

This paper reviews the impact of policies to address banking sector weaknesses through the first months of 2009. At the time of this assessment, central bank intervention had successfully addressed pressures on bank liquidity, but the underlying financial position of financial institutions,...

In this paper we look into the interaction of Google's search queries and several aspects of international equity markets. Using a novel methodology for selecting words and a VAR modeling approach, we study whether the search queries of finance related words can have an impact on market...