Long-term financing plays an important part in calming the markets and thus ensuring the stability of economies. The German market for residential real estate financing provides an impressive example of this. However, new financial market regulations such as Basel III and Solvency II will cause...

The good news is that Europe will not be dominated by populist parties. For big tent parties, i.e. the conservative EPP and the social democratic PES, however, results still aren’t rosy – they are looking at heavy losses, including the loss of their joint majority. From now on you need at...

A new theory of interest rates, the Neo-Fisherian theory, predicts a low inflation rate due to a central bank's low interest rate. After several years of near-zero interest rate policies and low and even negative infl ation rates in the eurozone and in the US, this theory gained momentum in...

Convergence among regions is explicitly defined as a political aim of the European Union. Overall, NUTS3 regions have indeed shown a path of convergence since the year 2000, but there are huge differences among the regions. Many Eastern European countries as well as several regions in Spain and...