Superhappy that our recent work with Bettina Bökemeier on fiscalpolicy in the EU, has just been accepted to the International Economics journal. We find that before the pandemic, the discretionary fiscal policy across the EU was highly pro-cyclical. It changed during the pandemic years, because of massive discretionary spending in 2020 and 2021. Yet we still find a change in fiscal reaction function even when removing the pandemic-related expenditures. See the working paper version here.

Happy to share that our paper on News-implied Sovereign Risk Index (NSRI) has just been awarded the best paper award at the 2022 China International Conference in Finance. Our approach confirms that news articles can be informative about countries’ default risk. This feature is particularly relevant for those economies which lack market-based measures, or the markets are illiquid. Read the full paper here. Big thank you to the organizers!

The pandemic crisis has a chance to redefine the EU fiscal framework. In the recent study, which was just published as University of Bielefeld Working Paper, we confirm a clear fiscal counter-cyclicality in virtually every Member State in 2020 and 2021. It seems that the fiscal rules have been relaxed for a good reason this time.

Our paper on predicting sovereign risk factors from media stories has just been released at the SSRN. We confirm that big data techniques help when there is no (or too little) market data available.

Very happy to see the work on productivity slowdown in the EU being released in the EIB Working Paper Series. We show that firm-level financial conditions matter greatly for aggregate productivity dynamics. Reducing collateral bottlenecks could more than double the effectiveness of financial leverage in spurring productivity growth in the Western Europe between 2014-17.

We develop a new micro-founded framework to measure contributions of financial factors to the allocative efficiency component. Happy to share the most recent version of the paper here.