Euro-nomics

We are a group of European economists who, over the past years, have individually been thinking and providing advice about different aspects and regions of the European crisis. After repeatedly meeting each other at policy events and reading each others’ analyses, we decided to join forces in early 2011. Our objective has been to systematically identify the weaknesses of the Euro area design that have caused this crisis and propose remedies to end it.

Our group includes macroeconomists and financial economists who are experts on international issues and on the domestic economy.  We share a common desire for using economic theory to answer applied questions rigorously. Over several months, we have met regularly to discuss the European crisis with the aim of achieving two goals. First, we want to provide a clear economic analysis of the implications of various policy measures  being proposed in the current political debate. Second, we plan to put forward our own proposal for overcoming the Eurozone’s problem that addresses the core issues within the boundaries of the European Treaties.

This website will collect our writings. The blog provides the latest news; the ESBies page contains material related to our proposal for “European Safe Bonds”; and the Media Coverage page links to related op-ed articles written by members of the group.

Markus Brunnermeier (Princeton University),
Luis Garicano (London School of Economics),
Sam Langfield (ESRB),
Philip R. Lane (Trinity College Dublin),
Marco Pagano (University of Naples Federico II ),
Ricardo Reis (London School of Economics),
Tano Santos (Columbia Business School,  Columbia University),
David Thesmar (Hautes Etudes Commerciales, Paris),
Stijn van Nieuwerburgh (New York University Stern School of Business), and
Dimitri Vayanos (London School of Economics).

Markus K. Brunnermeier, Princeton University  (http://scholar.princeton.edu/markus), wikipedia entry

Markus K. Brunnermeier, a German national, is the Edwards S. Sanford Professor at Princeton University. He is a faculty member of the Department of Economics and director of Princeton’s Bendheim Center for Finance. He is the founding and former director of Princeton’s Julis Rabinowitz Center for Public Policy and Finance and affiliated with the International Economics Section. He is also a research associate at NBER, CEPR, and CESifo. He is a member of several advisory groups, including to the IMF, the Federal Reserve of New York, the European Systemic Risk Board, the Bundesbank and the U.S. Congressional Budget Office. Brunnermeier was awarded his Ph.D. by the London School of Economics (LSE).

His research focuses on international financial markets and the macroeconomy with special emphasis on bubbles, liquidity, financial and monetary price stability. To explore these topics, his models incorporate frictions as well as behavioral elements. He is a Sloan Research Fellow, Fellow of the Econometric Society and the recipient of the Bernácer Prize granted for outstanding contributions in the fields of macroeconomics and finance. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship for studying the impact of financial frictions on the macroeconomy. He has been awarded  several best paper prizes and served on the editorial boards of several leading economics and finance journals. He has tried to establish the concepts liquidity spirals, CoVaR as co-risk measure, the Volatility Paradox, Paradox of Prudence, ESBies, financial dominance and the redistributive monetary policy.

Luis Garicano, London School of Economics (www.garicano.com)

Luis Garicano, a Spanish national, is Professor at the London School of Economics, where he holds a Chair in Economics and Strategy at the Departments of Management and of Economics. He was previously a Professor of Economics and Strategy at the Booth School of Business of the University of Chicago, and has held visiting positions at MIT’s Sloan School and at the London Business School.  He is also a Research Fellow at the CEPR and a member of the Editorial Board of the Review of Economic Studies.  His research focuses on the determinants of economic performance at the firm and economy-wide levels, on the consequences of globalization and information technology for economic growth, inequality and productivity, and on the architecture of institutions and economic systems to minimize incentive and bounded rationality problems. His empirical and theoretical research has been published, among other journals, in the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, and the Quarterly Journal of Economics.  In 2007, he received the Banco Herrero prize to the best economist in Spain under 40 years old. He holds BAs  in Law and in Economics, a Masters in European Economic Studies from the College of Europe in Belgium in 1992,  and  a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago. Under the FEDEA foundation in Madrid, where he holds the McKinsey chair, Professor Garicano  has undertaken applied, policy relevant research, on the economic reforms necessary in Spain, producing documents among others on the  Spanish Savings Banks, the Spanish labor market, the productivity of the Spanish economy, and the reforms required to adjust the health and pensions systems to  the demographic changes that Spain is experiencing. He is an editor and co-founder of Nadaesgratis, the leading blog in Spanish on economic affairs.

Sam Langfield, ESRB (http://www.samlangfield.com/)

Sam Langfield is Principal at the European Systemic Risk Board, based in the European Central Bank, where he has worked since 2011. He was a visiting researcher at Princeton University’s Economics Department and Bendheim Center for Finance over 2015-16. Previously, he was an economist at the Bank of England and the UK Financial Services Authority. He holds an MA degree in philosophy, politics and economics from Oxford University.

Philip R. Lane, Trinity College Dublin (http://www.philiplane.org/)

Philip R. Lane is Governor of the Central Bank of Ireland. He was Professor of International Macroeconomics at Trinity College Dublin. He is also a research fellow of the CEPR and a managing editor of Economic Policy. He also served on the editorial boards of the Journal of International Economics, International Journal of Central Banking, Empirica, Open Economies Review and Moneda y Credito. His research interests include financial globalisation, the macroeconomics of exchange rates and capital flows, macroeconomic policy design, European Monetary Union, and the Irish economy.  In 2001, he was the inaugural recipient of the German Bernacer Award in Monetary Economics, awarded for outstanding contributions to monetary economics by European economists under 40; in 2010, he was the joint winner (with Gian Maria Milesi-Ferretti) of the Bhagwati Prize from the Journal of International Economics. He is also a member of the Royal Irish Academy, the Bellagio Group and the EURO-50 group and is a former member of the Handelsblatt  ECB Shadow Council.  He has consulted for the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, European Commission, European Central Bank, Asian Development Bank, OECD and a number of national central banks and other policy organisations.  He is the founder of The Irish Economy blog.

Marco Pagano (http://www.csef.it/people/pagano.htm)

Marco Pagano is Professor of Economics at University of Naples Federico II, President of the Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance (EIEF) and Research Fellow of the Centre for Studies in Economics and Finance (CSEF), the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), the European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI) and the European Economic Association (EEA). He holds a B.A. from Cambridge University and a Ph.D. in Economics from MIT, and taught at Bocconi University and the University of Salerno. In 1997 he received the BACOB European Prize for Economic and Financial Research, jointly with Ailsa Röell. From 2004 to 2011 he was the managing editor of the Review of Finance (the journal of the European Finance Association), together with Josef Zechner. In 2011 he was awarded an ERC Advanced Grant, for a 5-year research project on “Finance and Labor”.
He is Vice-Chair of the Advisory Scientific Committee of the European Systemic Risk Board (ESRB) and a member of the Group of Economic Advisors to the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA). In the past, he advised the Italian Treasury on the reform of security markets (1995-96), and was a member of the Treasury’s privatisation committee (1997-2001) and of the EU Parliament advisory panel on financial services (2002-04).
Most of his research is in the area of finance, especially in stock market microstructure, banking and corporate finance. His publications have appeared in several journals, such as American Economic Review, Review of Economic Studies, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Finance, Review of Financial Studies, RAND Journal of Economics, Journal of the European Economic Association, and Economic Journal. His book Market Liquidity:  Theory, Evidence and Policy (with Thierry Foucault and Ailsa Roëll) is forthcoming with Oxford University Press.

Ricardo Reis, London School of Economics (http://personal.lse.ac.uk/reisr)

Ricardo A. M. R. Reis is the A. W. Phillips Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics (LSE). Originally from Portugal, he received his B.Sc. degree from the LSE in 1999, and his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2004. He taught previously at Princeton University and Columbia University. He is currently a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (Cambridge, Mass.), a Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (London), a co-editor of the Journal of Monetary Economics, a member of the Board of Editors of the American Economic Review and the Journal of Economic Literature, and an associate editor of the Economic Journal and the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking. His main area of research is macroeconomics, both theoretical and applied, and some of his past work has focused on understanding why people are inattentive, why information spreads slowly, inflation dynamics, building better measures of inflation, unconventional monetary policy, and the evaluation of fiscal stimulus programs. He is a founding member of the blog The Portuguese Economy, and writes weekly in Portuguese for Dinheiro Vivo, which comes out with Jornal de Notícias and Diário de Notícias.

Tano Santos, Columbia University (http://www4.gsb.columbia.edu/cbs-directory/detail/494801/Tano+Santos)

Tano Santos is from Spain and currently holds the David L. and Elsie M. Dodd Professor of Finance and Economics chair at Columbia Business School of  Columbia University. He is co-director of the Heilbrunn Center for Graham & Dodd investing at Columbia University. He is a member of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR).  He obtained his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago and his BA from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. His research focuses in three areas: Asset Pricing, Financial Intermediation and Organizational Economics and has appeared in journals such as the Journal of Political Economy, American Economic Review and Quarterly Journal of Economics. He is the recipient of the 2000 Fame Research Prize for “Prospect Theory and Asset Prices” (with Nick Barberis and Ming Huang) and the IV Premio Jaime Fernandez de Araoz for “Cream Skimming in Financial Markets” (with Patrick Bolton and Jose Scheinkman). He is associated with the Madrid based Fundación de Estudios de Economía Aplicada (FEDEA) where he holds the Cátedra Abertis and he publishes regularly on the Spanish press on topics related to the Spanish financial crisis.

David Thesmar, MIT Sloan (https://studies2.hec.fr/jahia/Jahia/thesmar)

David Thesmar, a French national, is a professor of Finance at MIT Sloan, Cambridge, MA. He is a research fellow at CEPR and taught for many years taught at HEC, Paris. His research interests are: behavioral finance, financial intermediation, corporate finance and governance. His papers have been published in major finance and economics journals, such as the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, the Review of Financial Studies, the Review of Economic Studies, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the American Economic Review, and Econometrica. He is also a member of the Council of Economic Analysis, a body of experts appointed by the French Prime Minister that provide advice on policy issues. He has written two popular books (Le Grand Méchant Marché, 2007, and La Société Translucide, 2010, both with Augustin Landier) on the relationship between the French, markets and the state. He is a regular columnist with the French economic newspaper Les Echos, and is a regular participant to various radio shows. Professor Thesmar obtained his undergraduate degree from Ecole Polytechnique and ENSAE in Paris, and his PhD from the Paris School of Economics.

Stijn van Nieuwerburgh, NYU (http://people.stern.nyu.edu/svnieuwe/)