1,721,042 research outputs found
Testing times for global financial governance
Ignazio Angeloni believes that the increase in financial interdependence in recent decades has not been matched by sufficient progress in the international coordination among regulatory authorities. In fact, the international financial system has suffered from insufficient globalisation of regulatory and supervisory policies, not excessive globalisation of financial markets.
International Unions
We model an international union as a group of countries deciding together on the provision of public goods or policies that generate spillovers across members. The trade-off between benefits of coordination and loss of independent policymaking endogenously determines size, composition and scope of the union. Policy uniformity reduces the union’s size, may block enlargement processes and induce excessive centralization. We study flexible rules with non-uniform policies that reduce these ine?- ciencies focusing on arrangements relevant in the context of existing unions or federal states, like enhanced cooperation, subsidiarity, federal mandates and earmarked grants.
The group of G20: Trials of global governance in times of crisis
In spite of the disappointing outcome of some recent summits, notably the most recent in Cannes, the G20 is and should remain the cornerstone of the global financial architecture. Its record of performance in the last three years, reviewed in this paper, is mixed but not as unambiguously negative as critics have said.
However, its effectiveness as a decision-maker has diminished over time. Enhancing the relevance and effectiveness of the G20 will require time and action on several fronts, including greater involvement and stronger commitment on the part of political leaders, better internal organisation and the development of a shared mission.
Ignazio Angeloni is the editor of the G20 Monitor.
Monetary Policy and Risk Taking
In this paper Bruegel Visiting Scholar Ignazio Angeloni (European Central Bank), Ester Faia (Goethe University Frankfurt, Kiel IfW and CEPREMAP) and Marco Lo Duca (European Central Bank) examine the links between monetary policy, financial risk and the business cycle, combining data evidence and a new DSGE model with banks. The model includes banks (modeled as in Diamond and Rajan, JF 2000 and JPE 2001) and a financial accelerator (Bernanke et al., 1999 Handbook). A monetary expansion increases the propensity of banks to assume risks. In turn, financial risks affect economic activity and prices. This "risk-taking" channel of monetary transmission, absent in pure financial accelerator models, operates via the leverage decisions of banks. The model results match certain features of the data, as emerged in recent panel data studies and in our own time series estimates for the US and the euro area.
National Sovereignty in an Interdependent World
What are the sovereign rights of nations in an interdependent world, and to what extent do these rights stand in the way of achieving important international objectives? These two questions rest at the heart of contemporary debate over the role and design of international institutions as well as growing tension between globalization and the preservation of national sovereignty. In this paper, we propose answers to these two questions. We do so by first developing formal definitions of national sovereignty that capture features of sovereignty emphasized in the political science literature. We then utilize these definitions to describe the degree and nature of national sovereignty possessed by governments in a benchmark (Nash) world in which there exist no international agreements of any kind. And with national sovereignty characterized in this benchmark world, we then evaluate the extent to which national sovereignty is compromised by international agreements with specific design features. In this way, we delineate the degree of tension between national sovereignty and international objectives and describe how that tension can be minimized and in principle at times even eliminated through careful institutional design.
Do side payments help? Collective decisions and strategic delegation
I investigate when a exible bargaining agenda, where side payments are possible, facilitates cooperation in a context with strategic delegation. On the one hand, allowing side payments may be necessary when one partys participation constraint otherwise would be violated. On the other, with side payments each principal appoints a delegate that values the project less, since this increases her bargaining power. Reluctant agents, in turn, implement too few projects. I show that side payments are bad if the heterogeneity is small while the uncertainty and the typical value of the project are large. With a larger number of parties there may be a stalemate without side payments, but delegation becomes more strategic as well, and cooperation decreases in either case.Collective action, side transfers, bargaining agenda, strategic delegation, issue linkages
The Impact of Referendums on the Centralisation of Public Goods Provision: A Political Economy Approach
The paper compares decision-making on the centralisation of public goods provision in the presence of regional externalities under representative and direct democratic institutions. A model with two regions, two public goods and regional spillovers is developed in which uncertainty over the true preferences of candidates makes strategic delegation impossible. Instead, it is shown that the existence of rent extraction by delegates alone suffices to make cooperative centralisation more likely through representative democracy. In the non-cooperative case, the more extensive possibilities for institutional design under representative democracy increase the likelihood of centralisation. Direct democracy may thus be interpreted as a federalism-preserving institution.centralisation; direct democracy; representative democracy; public good provision.
Globalization and Political Geography
I study a model of geopolitical organization endogenizing the size of nations, of their public spending and of their degree of openness. The optimal geography may not be a stable equilibrium and the Alesina-Spolaore bias toward too many nations tends to be confirmed. However, multiple equilibria can emerge with globalization backlash associated with large nations and high protectionism and equilibria with smaller countries and high openness which are also Pareto superior. A dynamic version of the model shows stable paths of decreasing size of nations, increasing globalization and (at least initially) increasing public spending. Such a process seems consistent with the historical experience, but it may converge toward a steady state with excessive globalization, too many countries and typically too much government spending.
- …
