Smart strategies to increase prosperity and limit brain drain in Central Europe. CEPS Special Report, 6 November 2018

This is a summary of the expert conference held by CEPS and the Aspen Institute Central Europe on 6 November 2018. Citizens of new EU member states are increasingly leaving their countries to pursue better opportunities and reap the benefits of intra-EU mobility. In the immediate aftermath of accession to the European Union, economic reasons were the main drivers of mobility. Today, governments in new member states need to develop a clear vision about the reforms necessary to improve economic and social conditions and create incentives for their citizens to return and to stay. The danger is that, in the long-run, the benefits of intra-EU mobility for these countries will not be enough to compensate for a permanent ‘brain drain’

What lessons from the 1930s?

This paper explores three areas in which the experience of the Great Depression might be relevant today: monetary policy, fiscal policy and the systemic stability of the banking system. We confirm the consensus on monetary policy: deflation must be avoided. With regard to fiscal policy, the picture is less clear. We cannot confirm a widespread opinion according to which fiscal policy did not work because it was not tried. We find that fiscal policy went to limit of what was possible under the conditions as they existed then. Our investigation of the US banking system shows a surprising resilience of the sector: commercial banking operations (deposit taking and lending) remained profitable even during the worst years. This suggests one policy conclusion: At present the authorities, in both the US and Europe, have little choice but to make up for the losses on ‘legacy’ assets and wait for banks to earn back their capital. But to prevent future crisis of this type one should make sure that losses from the investment banking arms cannot impair commercial banking operations. At least a partial separation of commercial and investment banking seems thus justified by the greater stability of commercial banking operations.Great depression; Monetary policy; Fiscal policy; Commercial banks

The Spanish hangover. CEPS Policy Brief No. 267, April 2012

Spain faces high unemployment and slow growth. This paper focuses on an important source of those problems, namely its housing market. While some adjustment has occurred since Spain's housing bubble burst in 2008, the authors find that house prices and construction need to decrease more to slow Spain's unsustainable accumulation of foreign debt

"Taylored rules". Does one fit (or hide) all?

Modern monetary policymakers consider a huge amount of information to evaluate events and contingencies. Yet most research on monetary policy relies on simple instrument rules and one relevant underpinning for this choice is the good empirical fit of the Taylor rule. This paper challenges the solidness of this foundation. We investigate the way the coefficients of the Taylor-type rules change over time according to the evolution of general economic conditions. We model the Federal Reserve reaction function during the Greenspan’s tenure as a Logistic Smoothing Transition Regime model in which a series of economic meaningful transition variables drive the transition across monetary regimes. We argue that estimated linear rules are weighted averages of the actual rules working in the diverse monetary regimes, where the weights merely reflect the length and not necessarily the relevance of the regimes. Accordingly, an estimated linear Taylor-type reaction function tends to resemble the rule adopted in the longest regime. Thus, the actual presence of finer monetary policy regimes corrupts the general predictive and descriptive power of linear Taylor-type rules. These latter, by hiding the specific rules at work in the various finer regimes, lose utility directly with the uncertainty in the economy.Instrument Rules, LSTR, Monetary Policy Regime, Risk Management, Taylor Rule

Twenty years of the euro - Resilience in the face of unexpected challenges. Monetary Dialogue. CEPS Special Report, January 2019

The first 20 years of the euro were very different from what had been anticipated. Deflation, rather than inflation became a problem. Financial markets, which had been neglected, became a major source of instability. However, the euro area proved resilient and support for the euro is at historic highs. Looking to the future, the greatest danger might not be another financial crisis, but sluggish growth and an increasing gulf between countries that have successfully adjusted their public finances and those where this goal remains increasingly distant. This document was provided by Policy Department A at the request of the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs

The Greek economy is unlikely to benefit from further devaluation. CEPS Commentary, 3 July 2015

Martin Wolf offers an excellent analysis of how the Greek voter may feel about Sunday’s referendum.1 There is no good option: either be engulfed in the chaos following the rejection of the programme, exit and collapse of the economy or accept another programme

Assessing the Euro Area’s Shock-Absorption Capacity Risk sharing, consumption smoothing and fiscal policy. CEPS Special Report No. 146 / September 2016

this paper assesses both the state of play and the future capacity of the EMU to respond and adapt to asymmetric shocks. The objective is to provide a basis upon which to gauge the potential value added of a European Unemployment Benefits Scheme (EUBS), against the background of the recent plans for the Banking Union, the Capital Markets Union and the reform of the fiscal governance framework. We find that the capacity of the system to deal with asymmetric shocks (and in principle reduce their occurrence) is likely to increase due to these changes, but it will remain limited in the medium term and certainly lower than in the US. We also argue that given the broad pro-cyclicality of fiscal policy, the idea that national policies alone can deal alone with asymmetric shocks is not realistic. Lastly, we maintain that an ex-ante fiscal insurance mechanism can provide some degree of income smoothing and is likely to catalyse market insurance. Fiscal and market insurance can reduce the role of credit and borrowing, which until now has been the main channel for shock absorption in the euro area but also the least effective in times of crisis. We conclude that, from a macroeconomic point of view, an EUBS is a useful tool to improve shock absorption capacity and is not mutually exclusive with market risk sharing

China’s slowdown: When the dragon catches the flu, Europe sneezes. CEPS Commentary, 25 September 2015

Notwithstanding the erratic stock market responses around the world, this CEPS Commentary argues that while a slowdown of the world’s second-largest economy may not be good news for Europe, its effects will not be as bad as headlines would have us believe. In the short term, it finds that the biggest risks from the Chinese slowdown may be political, stemming from a weakening of the Renminbi, either from actions taken by China’s central bank and/or from large capital outflows