Blog

New survey: Global Tides on Local Shores

My interpretative survey “Global Tides on Local Shores: How Do International Capital Flows Affect House Prices?” is now published in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Economics and Finance. It reviews what we have learned about how international capital flows shape house prices across countries.

The European Angle: how can we preserve Europe’s social model?

A couple of weeks ago I participated in a great initiative launched by two high-school students at Kantonsschule Wettingen. They run a You-Tube podcast channel on European economics and politics called the “[European Angle](http://European Angle)” that I think deserves to get a lot of attention. I had the pleasure to be invited by Rafael and his friend Myles for a discussion of how Europe can balance its traditional social model with the demands that the new geopolitical order puts on our societies. The discussion is available here.

New paper in Financial History Review

Our paper “Branch banking and regional financial markets: evidence from prewar Japan” with Okubo Toshihiro (Keio University) and Okazaki Tetsuji (Meiji Gakuin University)is now published as open access article in the Financial History Review.

Almost 9 months into Trump II: Tariffs, Trade wars, and the future of (Switzerland in) Europe

With the (not so) new man in the White House, it has been a busy first three quarters of 2025 for the global economics punditry. Such are the times that even the writer of this blog was occasionally asked to leave the ivory tower to comment on current affairs. While I found it difficult to update this space in real time over the last couple of months, here is a round-up of my recent media contributions:

The SNB and its Watchers

Together with Harris Dellas, I am organizing this year’s SNB and its watchers conference at the University of Zurich on November 22nd. See here for details and the program

New paper in the JPE Macro

My paper Softening the Blow: U.S. State-Level Banking Deregulation and Sectoral Reallocation after the China Trade Shock with Lilia Ruslanova Habibulina is about to appear in the September 2024 issue of the Journal of Political Economy Macroeconomics. (follow the link above for open access. Link to replication files in the Harvard Dataverse).

Keynote at 2023 GPEG meeting.

At the 2023 meeting of the Global Economic Policy Group (GPEG), I gave a keynote lecture on US Banking deregulation and sectoral reallocation after the China trade shock. This year the meeting was hosted by Hans-Jörg Schmerer‘s group from FU Hagen (Germany’s remote learning unversity) at the FU campus in Nürnberg. This was a fun event and some pictures and programs of this year’s and previous editions can be found here. My keynote slides are available here. ( A revised version of the underlying paper is coming soon…)

Of banks and crises: the 2022 Nobel Prize in Economics

An article (in German) about this year’s Nobel prize that I wrote with my colleagues Christian Ewerhart and Joachim Voth just appeared in the Swiss economic policy journal “Die Volkswirtschaft”. Learn more about why financial crises are hard to predict, why banks must be unstable, why the laureates’ work is super relevant in a world of digital currencies — and what the late Queen Elizabeth II has to do with it all: https://dievolkswirtschaft.ch/de/2022/11/nobelpreis-2022-von-banken-und-krisen/?v