Using an international sample of 95 banks from 21 European and North American countries spanning from 2008 to 2014, this paper assesses the effectiveness of a large set of general and housing macro-prudential policies in controlling banks' systemic importance and risk-taking incentives....

This paper investigates the complementarity between the different macroprudential policies to contain bank systemic risk. We use a newly updated version of the IMF survey on Global Macroprudential Policy Instruments (GMPI). By disentangling the aggregate macroprudential policy index, we assess...

The use of macro stress tests to assess bank solvency has developed rapidly over the past few years. This development was reinforced by the financial crisis, which resulted in substantial losses for banks and created general uncertainty about the banking sector's loss-bearing capacity. Macro...

We conduct an experiment within a large-scale household survey on public finance in France, the Netherlands and Italy. We elicit prior beliefs via open-ended questions and introduce a measure of macroeconomic policy literacy. An educational blog post from a central bank (CB) that opposes...

This work examines the impacts which the Covid-19 pandemic brought to the stability of the European financial sector. Lockdowns, businesses unable to operate and uncertainty about how the pandemic would evolve fueled a sharp recession. From the lessons learned in the global financial crises and...

The eurozone is in political and economic crisis. This is due to the inadequate design of the institutional structure of the eurozone and to the current poor implementation of macroeconomic policy. In designing the eurozone, well established principles of economics were ignored and major...

The prevailing narrative about the Great Recession is that it was caused by a financial crisis. This paper refutes that explanation and offers an alternative, namely that issuance of bad government debt played a key role in escalating a regular recession to an economic crisis

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Scotland had a stable financial system. Its stability arose from the pressure that private banks, which had the right to issue bank notes, placed on each other to behave prudently. Unlike in England, the Scottish banking system had no central...

This paper discusses why Greece has done so poorly in comparison with all other European Union countries since the onslaught of the global financial crisis in 2008. To show what was wrong with its fiscal adjustment, this paper compares Greece with the other European Union country that was hit be...

We measure the systemic importance of all banks that issue publicly traded CDS contracts among the world’s biggest 150. Systemic importance is captured by the intensity of spillovers of daily CDS movements. Our new empirical tool uses Bayesian VAR to address the dimensionality problem and...