In a new column on VoxEU entitled
Banking integration in the EMU — let’s get real
Mathias Hoffmann, Egor Masolv, Bent Sorensen and Iryna Stewen argue that dependence on domestic banks reduces risk-sharing in a crisis, reducing GDP growth in affected country-sectors. Benefits from banking integration are only robust to global shocks if banking integration takes the form of cross-border lending to firms and households.
Mathias Hoffmann is the Scientific Director of a new research network “Globalization of Real Estate Markets” (GREN) at the UZH Center for Urban and Real Estate Management. The objective of the network is to provide an international forum for economic research that examines how the forces of globalization shape housing markets around the world. To this end, the network collects and aggregates data on international real estate markets and organizes academic conferences, summer schools and policy events.
On Nov 29th, I gave a public lecture on China’s role in the origins and the handling of the financial crisis as part of a lecture series commemorating the 10th anniversary of the global financial crisis.
Building on my research with Iryna Stewen and Yi Huang, I argue that global imbalances were an important factor in the run-up of the crisis. But the crisis was ultimately caused by U.S.specific factors (lax supervision, political pressure to increase home ownership, weak incentives for proper screening).
During the crisis, China reacted with a massive fiscal expansion. This contributed to stabilizing global demand but it also exacerbated the misallocation of capital within China.
The lecture slides are available here (password protected — send me an e-mail for access)
Mathias Hoffmann gave an interview to Swiss Television on the threats to emerging market economies from a strengthening dollar.
A short policy piece by Mathias Hoffmann and his co-authors Bent Sorensen, Egor Maslov and Iryna Stewen on how to ensure that risk sharing in EMU becomes resilient to systemic banking shocks has just appeared in a new CEPR e-book edited by my colleagues Jan-Egbert Sturm and Nauro Campos entitled
In this piece we build on some of our earlier and on ongoing current research to compare the state of banking integration in the EMU today to that in the U.S. prior to state-level banking deregulation in the 1980s. As in the U.S. then, EMU today is essentially an integrated interbank market. But— as was the case among states in the U.S. prior to 1980— there is little direct cross-border lending of banks to firms or cross-border branching in the EMU. This makes macroeconomic risk sharing susceptible to systemic crisis as well as to country-specific banking sector shocks. We conclude that a proper banking union will have to encourage the cross-border consolidation and branching of banks and that this has to be complemented by a proper capital market union that encourages the cross-border ownership of equity. Just focusing on one of the two unions —as is currently advocated by some policymakers—will not be enough. A pre-publication version of the piece can also be downloaded here.
The book was launched ahead of the June 25th EU summit with some presentations by the authors across Europe, including two by Mathias Hoffmann at the Bank of Finland on June 19th and at ETH Zürich on June 22nd.
Mathias Hoffmann will present his new paper
“Are capital market and banking union complements? Evidence from Risk Sharing Channels in the EMU”
co-authored with Egor Maslov, Bent E. Sorensen and Iryna Stewen at the Conference “The Euro at 20” on June 25-26 2018 co-organized by the IMF, the Central Bank of Ireland and the IMF Economic Review. The full program of the conference and the conference draft of the paper are available here. For the current version of the paper follow the link at the paper title above.
On May 9th Mathias Hoffmann talked to Swiss Economic Newspaper “Handelszeitung” about the economic implications of the election of Emmanuel Macron to the French presidency. Read the full interview here
Mathias Hoffmann has been appointed a visiting scholar at Norges Bank, the Norwegian Central bank, for the year 2017. During his visits he will work on a project with André Anundsen and Erling Roed-Larsen about the role of household leverage for housing demand.
My paper “A provincial view of Global Imbalances: Regional Capital Flows in China” with Samuel Cudré (Mc Kinsey & Co) is now forthcoming in the Review of World Economics
My paper with Rahel Suter “Systematic Consumption Risk in Currency Returns” is forthcoming in the Journal of International Money and Finance