Containing Systemic Risk

Systemic risk refers to the risk of financial system breakdown due to linkages between institutions. This risk cannot be assessed by looking at how individual institutions manage risks but instead requires a full understanding of how the system as a whole operates. At present, the data available to central banks and financial regulators are not at all adequate for the task of assessing systemic risk and the new European Systemic Risk Board needs to address this issue. There is a lot of exciting ongoing research devoted to measuring systemic risk and providing signals to regulators as to when and where they should intervene. However, the tools being developed are still limited in their usefulness. More pressing than the development of these tools is the development and implementation of policy measures to make the financial system more robust. These measures should include higher capital ratios, limits on non-core funding and redesigning financial systems to be less complex.Financial Risk,Systemic Risk,Banking

Policy Lessons from Ireland’s Latest Depression

This paper provides a selective review of Ireland’s economic performance of the last 20 years, from the early days of the Celtic Tiger, through to the housing boom and the recent slump, and then attempts to draw a few lessons from the period. The paper argues, based on a range of observations, that a substantial slowdown was looming for Ireland by 2007, independent of what was going to happen in the global economy, and much of this evidence was ignored in the implementation of economic policy. The result was a range of policies based on an unwarranted over-optimism which left Ireland terribly exposed to the international downturn. Policy failures in the fiscal and banking sectors are discussed, as well as some common criticisms of policy that have less justification.

Economic Geography and the Long-run Effects of the Great Irish Famine

One of the most important debates in Irish economic history has concerned the long-run effects of the Great Irish Famine, with some arguing that it had only temporary effects on the economy and others seeing it as a major demographic and economic watershed. This paper adapts the theoretical framework of Krugman (1991) to illustrate how the combination of the Famine and developments in transportation and the demand for industrial products may have worked together to cause persistent depopulation and relative industrial decline.

Policy Lessons from Ireland’s Latest Depression

In this paper, I provide a selective review of Ireland’s economic performance of the last 20 years, from the early days of the Celtic Tiger, through to the housing boom and the recent slump, and then attempt to draw a few lessons from the period. I argue, based on a range of observations, that a substantial slowdown was looming for Ireland by 2007, independent of what was going to happen in the global economy, and much of this evidence was ignored in the implementation of economic policy. The result was a range of policies based on an unwarranted over-optimism which left Ireland terribly exposed to the international downturn. Policy failures in the fiscal and banking are are discussed, as well as some common criticisms of policy that have less justification.Celtic Tiger, Boom and Slump, Lessons from the period

The ECB’s Role in Financial Supervision

The European Council’s decisions to implement the De Larosiere recommendations for a reformed approach to micro-level financial supervision and a new European Systemic Risk Board (ESRB) are to be welcomed. The ECB’s central role in the ESRB is also to be welcomed. However, the limited role envisaged for the ESRB means that it may not actually help much in preventing future crises. The ESRB should be given a central role in the implementation of counter-cyclical capital ratios and in promoting (and then overseeing implementation of) other changes such as maximum leverage ratios and limits on non-core funding.Reformed European Financial Supervision

Embodiment, Productivity, and the Age Distribution of Capital

An important theme in modern research on productivity has been that technological progress may be embodied in capital in the sense that traditional measures of TFP growth reflect unmeasured improvements in the quality of capital inputs as well as pure disembodied technological progress. It is commonly believed that an implication of this embodiment hypothesis is that there should be a negative relationship between measured TFP and the age of the measured capital stock. This paper presents empirical evidence which suggests that an increase in the age of the capital stock is actually associated with higher TFP. This surprising result may be due to the presence of a mis-measurement normally overlooked in this literature: With mis-measured improvements in capital quality, the usual depreciation rates used to construct empirical capital stocks are incorrect for growth accounting. This effect dominates the usual average age effect.

Technology Shocks and Hours Worked: Checking for Robust Conclusions

This paper presents some new results on the effects of technology shocks on hours worked based on structural VAR specifications containing various measures of US productivity growth and hours. These specifications can produce different answers depending on which sector of the economy is examined, which transformation of hours worked is used, and on how many lags are chosen for the VAR. However, it is shown that the results from the stochastic trend specification used by Jordi Galí (1999) are robust across changes in data definition and lag length, while the results from the per capita hours specification of Christiano, Eichenbaum, and Vigfusson (2003) are not. These results provide support for Galí’s findings that technology shocks have a negative impact effect o hours worked and that these shocks play a limited role in generating the business cycle.

ELA, Promissory Notes and All That: The Fiscal Costs of Anglo Irish Bank

This is a briefing paper the author distributed to the Irish parliamentary committee responsible for finance and public expenditure. It describes the balance sheet of Irish Bank Resolution Corporation, the organisation that was formed by combining Anglo Irish Bank and Irish Nationwide Buildings Society. The nature of the long-run cost to the Irish state of taking over the liabilities of these institutions is outlined and suggestions are made for reducing these costs.Banking Crises, Anglo Irish Bank, Emergency Liquidity Assistance, European Central Bank

EU Economic Governance: Less Might Work Better Than More

The European Commission has recently proposed a new package of reforms of the Stability and Growth Pact. The package contains a number of good proposals. In particular, the increased focus on debt ratios is a very positive suggestion though this should be strengthened further. However, some of the other proposals, such as the new principle of prudent fiscal management and the scoreboard for non-fiscal imbalances, are poorly thought out and perhaps unworkable. A smaller number of well-focused proposals may end up working better than this complex, and perhaps overly ambitious, package. And a coherent policy to allow for orderly sovereign defaults in Euro area member states would probably place more pressure, via bond markets, on states to get their fiscal houses in order than would the proposed system of fines.

Global Imbalances and the Financial Crisis

Did global imbalances cause the financial crisis? A number of influential figures have argued that inflows of foreign capital into the US due to the current account deficit helped to trigger the crisis. This paper argues that the evidence for this position is weak. The capital inflows into the US associated with the current account deficit were also not the key factor driving foreign purchases of US toxic assets. The so-called global savings glut was not as significant a pattern as is often presented. Macroeconomic policies that reduced global imbalances could have been adopted but these would probably not have prevented the crisis. Global policy efforts to prevent a recurrence of the financial crisis need to focus on improved banking regulation. Reducing global imbalances should be of secondary importance.