Based on a conjoint survey experiment we explore the support among European citizens for a European Union (EU) budgetary assistance instrument to combat adverse temporary or permanent economic shocks hitting Member States. Suitably designed, there is quite substantial support for such an EU...

I consider a two-period model in which being "too big" is only a necessary condition for an insolvent firm to receive a government bailout because, in addition to meeting a threshold asset size, the firm must engage in a lobbying contest in order to be bailed out. The firm has a political...

We model a banking union of two countries whose banking sectors differ in their average probability of failure and externalities between the two countries arise from cross-border bank ownership. The two countries face (i) a regulatory decision of which banks are to be shut down before they can...

U.S. state-level banking deregulation during the 1980’s mitigated the impact of the China trade shock (CTS) on local economies (states and commuting zones) a decade later, in the 1990s. Local economies, where local banking markets opened up earlier, were also effectively financially more...

This paper investigates the impact of banking prudential regulation on sovereign risk. We show that prudential regulation reduces sovereign risk and induces governments to spend more. As a result, countries with tight prudential regulation have lower primary budget balances and accumulate more...

The emergence of so-called “decentralised finance” (DeFi) and a shadow financial system of cryptocurrency exchanges and stablecoin issuers raises the challenge of how to apply technology-neutral regulation so that similar risks are subject to the same rules. This paper makes the case for...

We model EU countries' bank ratings using financial variables and allowing for intercept and slope heterogeneity. Our aim is to assess whether 'old' and 'new' EU countries are rated differently and to determine whether 'new' ones are assigned lower ratings, ceteris paribus, than 'old' ones. We...

The harmonized European value-added tax (VAT) is anything but a modern consumption tax that taxes all goods and services at a uniform rate. As exemplified by an analysis of the Dutch version, some 60% of the base is exempted, that is, not taxed on output but on inputs. This has serious...

This paper discusses lessons that other regions could learn from European Union's effort to implement carbon pricing through EU Emission Trading System (EU ETS). Our lessons are, first of all, that a cap-and-trade system like EU ETS is very helpful in guaranteeing a credible and binding...

This paper develops a decomposition framework to study the importance of different stabilization channels of an unemployment re-insurance scheme for the euro area. Running counterfactual simulations based on household micro data for the period 2000–16, the paper finds that the re-insurance...