Softening the Blow of the China Trade Shock — and lessons for EMU in the times of COVID19

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My new paper with Lilia Ruslanova: Softening the Blow: U.S. State-Level Banking Deregulation and Sectoral Reallocation after the China Trade Shock is now online as UZH discussion paper. The upshot: U.S. state-level banking deregulation during the 1980s  considerably dampened the fallout on local economies of the China trade shock a decade later. The reason: households … Read more

Open Source software for Online Teaching in the times of Corona

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As schools and universities have been shutting down around the globe, many of us in academia are wondering how we can get up to speed and to establish a stable workflow that allows us to get our podcasts, on-line lectures and tutorials out there for our students. In this post I provide a subjective list of open source tools that I am using.

There are at least two reasons why open source has a key role to play in the current situation:

  • OSS is easy to roll out quickly and in large numbers (e.g. to an army of teaching assistants for multiple tutorial session in big lectures) , without any licensing issues and in a decentralized manner.
  • OSS is cheap . Actually it’s free. Hence, no need for financially stretched schools and universities to spend heaps of non-budgeted money on proprietary software at very short notice.

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Banking consolidation and risk sharing in the eurozone

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In a note summarizing my panel presentation at the recent Belgian Financial Forum /SUERF Conference “Cross border financial services: Europe’s Cinderella?” now appearing in the Revue bancaire et financière, I argue that cross-border banking consolidation is a prerequisite for better risk sharing in the eurozone. However, the incomplete banking union perpetuates regulatory fragmentation an d … Read more

New paper in the IMF Economic Review

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Our paper Channels of Risk Sharing in the Eurozone: What Can Banking and Capital Market Union Achieve? (with Egor Maslov, Iryna Stewen and Bent E. Sorensen) is now forthcoming in the IMF Economic Review. In the paper, we argue that the interplay of equity market and banking integration is of first-order importance for risk sharing … Read more

New paper in JEEA

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Our paper “ Holes in the Dike: The Global Savings Glut, U.S. House Prices and the Long Shadow of Banking Deregulation” (with Iryna Stewen) is now forthcoming in the Journal of the European Economic Association. In the paper, we argue that capital inflows into the U.S. greatly contributed to the housing boom in the years … Read more

Installing Linux Mint (or Ubuntu) on a Dell Precision 5530

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I firmly believe that using open source software is an important prerequisite for reproducible and accessible research. We cannot expect others (think e.g. students or researchers in developing countries) to buy super-expensive software to reproduce research. We should also make sure that the code we use, including the applications we run the code on, are … Read more

VoxEU column on Banking Integration in the EMU

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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 … Read more

Globalization of Real Estate Network

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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.   … Read more