In July, the European Commission fired the starting gun on the negotiations of the next Multiannual Financial Framework – the EU’s budget. Against a tough geopolitical and economic backdrop, the call to bolster Brussels’ public finances clashes with the reluctance of some member states to spend more centrally. This column outlines a possible way forward […]
UK CPI inflation in 1975 reached 25%, a period now known as the ‘Great Inflation’. This column uses a range of empirical and narrative evidence to illustrate the importance of fiscal policy in this period. While stabilising and reducing debt has been the primary peacetime fiscal policy objective for most of modern British history, this […]
Central banks facing post-pandemic inflation often considered ‘looking through’ supply shocks. Using a New Keynesian framework in which agents gradually learn whether a cost-push shock is temporary or persistent, this column shows that such look-through strategies can amplify inflation when information is incomplete. In contrast, a standard Taylor rule prevents an additional demand-driven inflation impulse […]
Financial markets are volatile, and research attributes this to highly variable and often irrational investor beliefs. This column uses a large-scale survey of Chinese retail investors to study the role of investor memory in financial decision-making. Combining free recall of market episodes and probed recall of personal returns, it finds that sharp crashes and dramatic […]
As large language models gain traction, it is important to ensure that decisions delegated to them comply with ethical and legal principles. This column reports on an experiment in which state-of-the-art large language models were prompted to impersonate the CEO of a fictitious financial firm needing to repay corporate debt urgently with no funds available […]
President Trump’s “Liberation Day” announcement triggered a discussion of whether import tariffs can reduce trade deficits or boost certain industries. This column develops a model, calibrated to the US economy, which illustrates how a uniform import tariff generates both expansionary effects upstream and contractionary effects downstream and is highly inflationary, reflecting its hybrid nature as […]
Importing energy-intensive goods would be more efficient for EU clean industry goals than importing clean energy itself. Clean industrialisation is a political and economic priority for the European Union. For it to work, affordable clean energy is needed. However, producing this energy in Europe is constrained by limited renewable energy endowments (sunshine and wind) and […]
Trade and industrial policies designed to support domestic industries can unintentionally kindle technological progress abroad. This column examines the case of rare earth elements – a group of metals essential to producing batteries, lasers, and other high-tech components. These elements are not only critical to manufacturing at the knowledge frontier; they also have a low […]
