Economic Stimulus Packages: How to Explain Differences in the Level of Intensity in European Governments’ Response to the Financial Crisis?
Since the end of World War II, capitalism and liberalism have been viewed as the system of the rich and have led the world into a period of unprecedented economic growth and development. The recent financial and economic crisis, however, by its magnitude, has shaken the system significantly, and led many states to invest increasingly to sustain the economy and avoid a broader and more damaging collapse (in line with Keynesian theory). Through multilevel modelling of European state-level political, public finance and economic data, we investigated key drivers explaining differences in the level of intensity in European governments’ response to the financial crisis. First of all, politics can explain the volatile and mercantile side of the decisions. Secondly, also interesting is that monetary and public finance highlights the regulatory and financial pressure and constraints of the investment in the economic stimulus package. Thirdly, a macro-economic analysis can help us assess the link between the damage (economic crisis) and the remedies (stimulus packages). This thematic approach allowed us to assess key factors that influenced the governments in their decision making and explain the heterogeneity in the magnitude of response between countries.
Development and Crisis of the Welfare State: Parties and Policies in Global Markets
This text offers a systematic examination of the origins, character, effects and prospects of generous welfare states in advanced industrial democracies in the post-World War II era. The authors demonstrate that prolonged government by different parties results in different welfare states, with strong differences in levels of poverty and inequality. Combining quantitative studies with historical qualitative research, the authors look closely at nine countries that achieved high degrees of social protection through different types of welfare regimes: social democratic states, Christian democratic states, and "wage earner" states.
Why are Securitization Issues Tranched
Securitisations usually involve creating multiple tranches of a single issue with different characteristics, placed on the market as separate securities. Various theoretical explanations have been advanced to explain such tranching. This paper provides the first systematic testing of such theories using a proprietary database of over 5000 separate tranches in European securitisations raising a total of $1 trillion. We find support for asymmetric information and market segmentation explanations for tranching and present evidence on how such different rationales influence the structuring process in practice. We also investigate the impact of tranching on the price of securities issued. For those issues where our model predicts a higher optimal number of tranches, we find that additional uniquely-rated tranches are associated with higher prices for the issue as a whole.