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Economy Environment

How Providing Sustainable Finance to More Women Helps Fight Climate Change

Women´s contributions to climate action are severely limited by systems that downplay women´s roles, capacity, and potential. Greater access to sustainable and gender-equitable green finance will help women be frontrunners in global efforts to address climate change. Women and girls are particularly affected by climate change, and they can aid and benefit from climate adaptation […]

Banking

Green QE and carbon pricing: Looking at potential tools to fight climate change

While there is broad consensus that carbon pricing (i.e. a carbon tax) is an effective instrument for combatting climate change (Gollier 2021, Golosov et al. 2014, Stern 2015, Van der Ploeg 2022), the potential contribution of central banks is still debated (Hansen 2022, Boneva et al. 2021). Central banks around the world have explored various […]

Energy

The energy crisis and the German manufacturing sector: Structural change but no broad deindustrialisation to be expected

Historically, despite being high in international comparison, European energy prices did not constitute an insurmountable obstacle to industrial expansion because of the exceptional energy efficiency of the local manufacturing sector (Rezessy et al. 2015). However, the recent developments in energy markets have driven an extreme wedge between prices in Europe and some other regions, as […]

Energy

Attention and social tariffs: Lessons for the energy crisis

We are living through a period of high inflation, driven by rising energy prices. Price hikes have an uneven impact on society, affecting low-income households in a particularly severe manner (Menyhert 2022). This, in turn, calls for mitigation policies that are at least partly targeted towards society’s most vulnerable groups, such as social tariffs or […]

Banking Finance

Stabilising financial markets: Lending and market making as a last resort

Starting with the 2007-2009 crisis and continuing with the Covid-19 pandemic, financial markets have faced a series of adverse liquidity shocks. As a result, central banks expanded their policy frameworks as enhanced lenders of last resort and market makers of last resort. This column summarises the key features of these expanded policy toolkits and how […]

Economy Featured

Helping Ukraine is not only crucial for peace in Europe but also for world peace

Western support for Ukraine against the unprovoked aggression by Russia since 24 February 2022 is often presented as a form of solidarity with, or even charity towards, the innocent victims of this brutal and cruel act of Russian imperialism. From that perspective, Ukraine’s continuous requests for financial and military help against the Russian aggressor are […]

Healthcare

Targeting precision medicine: Evidence from prenatal screening

Precision medicine has been widely heralded for its potential to transform both the practice of medicine and the economics of healthcare. Also known as personalised medicine, precision medicine targets treatments to patients based on their genetic, biological, or clinical characteristics. Examples include using biomarkers and genetic testing to personalise cancer treatment (Banerjee et al. 2020) […]

Banking

Markets, banks, and shadow banks

The aftermath of the 2007-2009 financial crisis resulted in the widespread adoption of tougher bank regulation, exemplified by the 2010 Accord of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, known as Basel III.  However, a concern has emerged about the possibility that the effectiveness of the new regulation may be hindered by a shift of intermediation […]

Featured News

Interwar trade policy in the Netherlands and the Netherlands East Indies

The 1930s are the classic period of deglobalisation and protectionism: a trade policy disaster (Irwin 2011). And yet, detailed quantitative studies of interwar trade policy remain relatively scarce. Early studies, based on very aggregate measures such as average tariffs or trade bloc dummy variables, tended to conclude that the impact of protectionism was surprisingly small (Irwin 1998, […]

Lifestyle Technology

The effect of new technologies on workers, jobs, and skills

Technological and organisational change is seen as one of the most critical factors driving the decline in the employment share of routine jobs (i.e. jobs that are predominantly repetitive and prescriptive in the tasks required). This is illustrated in a strand of papers (e.g. Autor et al. 2003, Goos and Manning 2007, Acemoglu and Autor […]