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Addressing Systemic Risk in Europe during Covid-19: policies, limitations, and challenges ahead
(2021)
This work examines the impacts which the Covid-19 pandemic brought to the stability of the European financial sector. Lockdowns, businesses unable to operate and uncertainty about how the pandemic would evolve fueled a sharp recession. From the lessons learned in the global financial crises and the Eurozone debt crises, there’s an increasing role of macroprudential policies, especially the regiments of the Basel III framework and the monetary policy toolkit. Alongside macroprudential regulation, the European Central Bank provided substantial monetary policy easing, for instance the release of capital buffers and other capital requirements, expanding the TLTRO III and Pandemic Emergency Program which facilitated monetary policy transmission. Authorities also deployed strong fiscal policies which encompassed from tax holidays to direct transfers to households and firms. The combination of fiscal, monetary, and regulatory policy was unprecedented and helped the economy during the shutdown moments. As a result, indicators of systemic risks in the banking sector during the pandemic remained relatively stable. Nevertheless, some challenges might emerge in the medium-term when policies are phased-out, namely the increasing size of non-performing loans and the sovereign doom-loop. Thus, in the final part of this text a stress test is conducted to evaluate the possible future impacts of the pandemic in the banking sector.
This thesis raises the question and will identify the macroeconomic implications associated with the erosion of the collective bargaining system and how these can potentially be stabilised. It is analysed whether an erosion of the collective agreement system is accompanied by a reduced coordination of wage setting and whether this has a destabilising effect on the entire national economy and beyond. This applies to the contribution of wages to price stability as well as the distribution of income and its consequences. In addition to the instruments and possibilities already under discussion to strengthen the collective bargaining system, potentials for stabilisation can also be derived with a view to France and the Netherlands.
Transnational Climate Change Governance Challenges and Prospects: The Case of Private Governance
(2021)
There are multiple environmental and social risks associated with climate change, which increases the severity of climate change and necessitates immediate actions to be taken. Responding to the challenge of climate change has traditionally been seen as the primary responsibility of nation-states. However, there is a surge of transnational actors consisting of non-state, sub-state actors, and private-public partnerships that claim governance responsibilities in climate change in recent years. The purpose of this thesis to identify circumstances and motivations that induced transnational climate governance practices. This research mainly focuses on private climate governance activities that are managed and regulated by the private sector and non-governmental organizations in the absence of a public authority. This thesis also aims to illuminate potentials and limitations of private climate governance mechanisms to scale up global climate action. Critical evaluation of the literature revealed that as United Nations-sponsored international climate change governance, architecture evolved from a top-down regulatory framework towards a flexible, bottom-up approach, from the Kyoto Protocol to the Paris Agreement. This process rendered intergovernmental structures and states to delegate and orchestrate greater authority to non- state actors to take climate action. In addition to this, governance deficits and governance gaps associated with the United Nations-regulated international climate governance lead non- state actors to entrepreneurially engage in governance practices due to their dissatisfaction with the intergovernmental framework. Two case studies are conducted to analyze private governance mechanisms in the form of voluntary carbon markets and carbon disclosure, which exhibit this entrepreneurial action in the absence of formal public authority. Results revealed that private climate governance practices incentivize climate action in the short-run, yet they might not accrue actual environmental progress in the long-run. In that sense, it remains puzzling whether the private governance practices can expand the scale and reach of global responses to climate change.
The Causes of Original Sin - an Empirical Investigation of Emerging Market and Developing Countries
(2021)
Necessity or Habit? A post-Keynesian Analysis of Rising Household Debt: The Case of Housing Market
(2021)
Unpaid care policies in the time of right-wing populism: a comparative analysis of Poland and Turkey
(2021)
In recent years, increasing political repressions on women that result with social unrests and street protests in Poland and Turkey arouse interest around the ties between unpaid care workers and the current governments. Rising conservative, right-wing and populist discourses and their effects relating to care work made a further exploration in this field inevitable. Thus, this thesis examines the impacts of current policies on unpaid care workers in social and economic terms. The hypothesis of this study suggests that unpaid care workers in Poland and Turkey are exploited to a greater extent by familialist policies during the right-wing and populist governments. The discourses and policies of the governments are analyzed in the light of previous literature on care work. The paper also applies an assessment developed by Leitner (2003) in order to classify Poland and Turkey together with six European countries according to their ways of providing childcare and elderly care services. The study clearly shows that unpaid care workers have been socially downgraded and not remunerated mainly through familialist policies either explicitly or implicitly under the hegemony of right-wing populist parties in Poland and Turkey.
Digitalization as an attribute of many western countries developed in the 19th century. As a driver of technological change, digitalization has encouraged the developments and production of derived technologies such as internets, computer, smart phone etc. Software applications such as zoom, blue-button etc. are proves that distance is no longer a barrier for communication. Overall, digitalization and technological change are a fundamental foundation for today’s economic growth. There has been rapid increase in new businesses due to creativity and innovation. While this is evident, the present increase in low wage, non-standard work, working poverty and skill shortages are a concern on how digitalization impact employment pattern and social life. The objective of this paper is to provide evidence on the rise of precarious employment and to express the extent at which digitalization impact skill shortages in the German labour market. Structural labour market problems such as skill shortages (continuous demand for high skill individuals) and rise in precarious employment are a major concern that needs to be tackled in the German labour market.
Fintech is an innovative tool that applies technology to improve financial services.
Mobile Baking is the most common product of Fintech and has vast prospects to
improve access to financial resources for the previously unbanked populations. The role
of Fintech in providing inclusion is especially vital in developing countries- where the
proportion of the financially excluded remains high. This study focuses on the role of
M-Banking in serving mentioned populations, and identifies the factors influencing
adoption and usage of Fintech services. The last part also introduces the case of
Azerbaijan-a former USSR country, and concludes by drawing the potential paths of its
Fintech-inclusion development.
The role of a Universal Basic Income in addressing the socio-ecological crisis – a critical analysis
(2021)
Human induced environmental degradation and the continuous rise in inequality are two of the greatest and most pressing challenges currently facing society (UN, 2020). Climate mitigation, ecological sustainability, combating poverty and social inequality are considered prevailing imperatives to contemporary global policy. On the premise that the challenges of ecological sustainability and social inequality call for a collective response, many scholars claim that it requires alternative proposals designed to initiate a multi-disciplinary socio-ecological transition (SET) that can address both issues in an integrated way (Hall et al., 2019). This paper considers the proposal of a Universal Basic Income (UBI)1 that has long been discussed as redistributive economic policy and at present increasingly receives attention regarding strategies to improve ecological sustainability. Although Basic Income (BI) proposals have been put forward by Green and post-growth movements such as degrowth, the ecological case receives less emphasis as evidenced by the fact that hitherto research on the interface of UBI and the environment has been fairly limited (MacNeill & Vibert, 2019). The present paper will enlarge upon the question of how adequate the concept of a BI policy might be in addressing the socio-ecological crisis by critically discussing arguments that indicate its positive environmental impact. By doing so, the paper contributes to the current academic debate on BI that has been revitalized in recent years.
The 2007/08 Global Financial Crisis is commonly attributed to the increased practice of securitization by nonbank financial intermediaries. Part of the New-Keynesian and Money View literature has focused on the imbalances of supply and demand for safe liquid assets as a demand-side explanation for the surge of such institutions. The demand of Institutional Cash Pools has attracted particular interest. This master thesis studies to which extent fiscal deficits have an effect on the portfolio rebalancing of Institutional Cash Pools in the institutional framework implemented after the crisis in the United States, considering the appropriate changes in regulation, and policy framework for monetary and fiscal policy. The theoretical background is based on the Institutionalist Post-Keynesian economics, highlighting the hierarchy of promises to pay and the liquidity-preference theory of interest. Moreover, the effects in the size of institutional investors derived from a stock-flow consistent perspective are considered. For this purpose, I propose a stock-flow consistent model where the size and portfolio of institutional cash pools is endogenous and fiscal policy is determined by exogenous parameters. The results show that fiscal expansion unambiguously increases the size of Institutional Cash Pools, whilst the composition is ambiguously affected depending on the way fiscal expansion occurs and other distribution parameters.
The debate over a European Green Deal has contributed to emphasize the need to reduce environmental cost and the urgency of decarbonizing the road transport sector. Therefore, the thesis operationalizes the materialist state theory to distinguish between competing hegemony projects in the struggle over the EU’s mobility transition, in order to identify the driving forces in the European road transport sector. By empirically analyzing the power relations behind the Energy Taxation Directive and the CO2 emissions for passenger cars, the results indicate two dominant hegemony projects that are contesting the implementation of the green transition: 'the authoritarian neoliberal project' and 'the green capitalist project'. None of these projects will be enough to decarbonize the transport sector without shifting emissions and environmental costs elsewhere, nor will either project move away from a car-dependent system.
This paper investigates whether macroeconomic policy regimes contributed to the emergence and shifts in macroeconomic demand and growth regimes in the core Euro Area before and after the Eurozone crisis. Against the background of Post-Keynesian/ Kaleckian theory, it is argued that financialisation has led to higher income inequality, lower investment in capital stock, an increase in the potential for debt- and wealth-based consumption as well as high current account imbalances. These four characteristics entailed the emergence of unstable and extreme macroeconomic demand and growth regimes, in particular the export-led mercantilist and the debt-led private demand boom type, in financialised economies. In a qualitative analysis based on quantitative data, it is assessed by which regime type eleven core Eurozone economies were characterized in the periods 2001-2009 and 2010-2019. In a second step, the main transmission channels of economic policies, namely of fiscal, monetary and wage policies, as well as open economy conditions on aggregate demand are examined, and placed in the European policy context. Building upon findings of the first empirical part, the macroeconomic policy mix of four prototype and major Eurozone economies is analysed for the period before and after the crisis. It is found that macroeconomic policy regimes contributed to the emergence and shifts in macroeconomic demand and growth regimes in core Eurozone economies during the considered period.