Recorded live at CEPR Paris Symposium 2022: Across Europe and beyond, populist movements have recently flourished. What does history teach us about the economic impact of populism – and is our taste for populists a bug or a feature of democracy? Tim Phillips talks to Moritz Schularick and Massimo Morelli.
The Covid-19 pandemic has profoundly affected the ecosystems that spur innovation and creativity around the world. This CEPR Press eBook untangles how the Covid shock shaped the innovation landscape of the world’s major economies, and how scientists, entrepreneurs and creative professionals responded to the crisis.
How has the global innovation system fared in the wake of the Covid-19 crisis? A new eBook untangles how the COVID-19 shock affected innovation ecosystems in different parts of the world and how scientists, entrepreneurs, and creative professionals responded to the shock. Innovation not only proved crucial in finding solutions to the crisis, overall the innovation system proved more resilient to the pandemic’s fallout compared to previous crises.
Throughout the world, the global financial crisis fostered the design and adoption of macroprudential policies to safeguard the financial system. This raises important questions for monetary policy, which, by contrast, primarily focuses on maintaining price stability. What, if any, is the relationship between (conventional) monetary policy and macroprudential policy? In particular, how does the effectiveness of macroprudential policies influence the conduct of monetary policy? This article reviews recent theoretical and empirical research addressing these questions.
While historically only very large firms issued in the European corporate bond market, recent years have seen the entry of many new players: small, private, and unrated issuers. Firm-level data show these new players face different game dynamics. They are disconnected from aggregate market movements and still depend heavily on banks. This means hey could potentially affect financial stability and be less responsive to policy interventions.
To what extent are corporate taxes passed on to consumers? And more generally, how do wholesaleproducers affect retail prices? Using data from Germany, where individual municipalities set local corporate taxrates, we shed new light on these questions. To estimate the impact of changes in producers’ tax rates onconsumer prices, we link 1,058 tax changes between 2013 and 2017 to changes in the retail prices of morethan 125,000 food and personal care products sold across Germany.
The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic shock posed an enormous challenge to fiscal policy in supporting household consumption. In this analysis, we report the results of a recent study (Georgarakos and Kenny, 2022) on the extent to which the pandemic-related fiscal interventions influenced consumers’ spending behaviour. The study finds that improving public perceptions about the adequacy of fiscal interventions incentivises spending. Importantly, this perceptions channel operates equally strongly for consumers who receive government support and for those who do not.
A survey among former ECB policymakers about the Bank’s monetary policy communication provides broad support for recent innovations in communication practices. It suggests that communication with expert audiences is generally adequate. Nevertheless, it highlights room for improvement along several dimensions, in particular in communication with the wider public.
There are always trade-offs to weigh up when taking monetary and macroprudential policy actions. Thechoice is between supporting the economy by ensuring a smooth supply of credit at favourableconditions, on the one hand, and containing financial stability risks, on the other hand. There are alsosignificant spillovers between the two policies since they are both implemented and transmitted throughthe financial system. Monetary and macroprudential authorities need to take these interactions intoaccount when deciding on interventions.
Homeownership among younger households has been decreasing in several major advanced economies. In this analysis, I show that increases in labour income inequality and uncertainty are key drivers of this trend. Confronted with high house prices and low, risky incomes, many young households cannot or do not want to risk making such a big, illiquid investment. As a result, they accumulate less wealth.
