{"title":"On the instability of fractional reserve banking","authors":"Heon Lee","doi":"10.1016/j.euroecorev.2025.105111","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.euroecorev.2025.105111","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper develops a dynamic monetary model to study the (in)stability of the fractional reserve banking system. The model shows that the fractional reserve banking system can endanger stability in that equilibrium is more prone to exhibit endogenous cyclic, chaotic, and stochastic dynamics under lower reserve requirements, although it can increase consumption in the steady state. Introducing endogenous unsecured credit to the baseline model does not change the main results. The calibrated exercise suggests that this channel could be another source of economic fluctuations. This paper also provides empirical evidence that is consistent with the prediction of the model.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48389,"journal":{"name":"European Economic Review","volume":"178 ","pages":"Article 105111"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144714306","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
David Huffman , Garrett Kohno , Pauline Madiès , Spencer Vogrinec , Stephanie W. Wang , Dhwani Yagnaraman
{"title":"Measuring social norm variation across contexts: Replication and comparison to alternative methods","authors":"David Huffman , Garrett Kohno , Pauline Madiès , Spencer Vogrinec , Stephanie W. Wang , Dhwani Yagnaraman","doi":"10.1016/j.euroecorev.2025.105097","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.euroecorev.2025.105097","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Studying social norms and how they vary in different contexts requires reliable measurements. We revisit the seminal Krupka and Weber (KW 2013) norm elicitation method and assess the importance of two dimensions of eliciting norms — first, whether to use the KW coordination game method or an alternative, two-stage method that directly elicits first-order or second-order beliefs about social appropriateness, and second, whether to use financial incentives. We replicate KW’s main finding of a qualitative difference in norms between the dictator game and a re-framed version that involves potentially taking money: KW and all other methods show that taking money is less socially appropriate than giving money, holding outcomes fixed and regardless of the presence of monetary incentives. However, we find that the difference in elicited social appropriateness between the two versions of the dictator game varies across methods, with elicited first-order beliefs exhibiting the largest gap in social appropriateness and KW exhibiting the smallest gap. One possible explanation is that strategic uncertainty and complexity in the KW method may attenuate sensitivity of the measure to differences in norms across contexts. A comprehension check reveals that about half of the KW participants initially misunderstood the task, and a prediction exercise reveals that first-order beliefs yield the best predictive power over actual behavior in simple dictator games. One implication is that first-order beliefs could be a simple alternative measure for capturing norm differences across contexts, with good predictive power. A caveat, however, is that first-order beliefs might be more subject to social desirability bias in settings with controversial or pluralistic norms.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48389,"journal":{"name":"European Economic Review","volume":"178 ","pages":"Article 105097"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-07-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144722552","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Tatiana Kirsanova , Campbell Leith , Celsa Machado , Ana Paula Ribeiro
{"title":"(Re)Evaluating recent macroeconomic policy in the US","authors":"Tatiana Kirsanova , Campbell Leith , Celsa Machado , Ana Paula Ribeiro","doi":"10.1016/j.euroecorev.2025.105091","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.euroecorev.2025.105091","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We build and estimate a small-scale DSGE mogement of the University of Porto, Rua Dr. Roberto Frias S/N, 4200-464 Porto, Portugaldel of the US, where policy is described as the strategic interaction between monetary and fiscal policy makers following targeting rules. We use this model to analyse the two episodes where interest rates hit their zero lower bound (ZLB). We find that changing fiscal policy objectives, adopting suitably designed fiscal packages or a temporary price level target could have generated a partial lift-off from the ZLB following the financial crisis. However, under the latter two devices we would have returned to the ZLB. We find that the duration of the ZLB of 2020 was two quarters too long, and the Trump-Biden fiscal stimulus was inflationary, but even taken together, these factors do not wholly explain the subsequent hike in inflation, which instead is predominantly due to the lingering effects of Covid-era shocks.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48389,"journal":{"name":"European Economic Review","volume":"178 ","pages":"Article 105091"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-07-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144687242","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Christopher J. Coyne , Nathan Goodman , André Quintas
{"title":"Ways of seeing the world: Legibility in alternative institutional settings","authors":"Christopher J. Coyne , Nathan Goodman , André Quintas","doi":"10.1016/j.euroecorev.2025.105116","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.euroecorev.2025.105116","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Legibility refers to the ability of people to make sense of the world. In <em>Seeing Like a State</em>, James Scott (1998) employs this concept to analyze efforts by governments to make the world legible through top-down efforts of standardization and control. State efforts to impose order often generate harms because they lack access to local experiential knowledge (<em>mētis</em>). How, then, can people make sense of the complexities of the world? This paper explores the answer to this question by considering ways of making the world legible across institutional contexts. After examining Scott’s critique of state-imposed high modernism, we consider two alternative forms of legibility—the market process and local community. In doing so, we engage the criticism that markets can also be a form of imposition and control. We highlight the importance of market contestability as a way of encouraging the use of local knowledge. Finally, we argue that political capitalism makes market outcomes more akin to state-led high modernism, impeding desirable complementarities between market discovery and <em>mētis</em>.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48389,"journal":{"name":"European Economic Review","volume":"178 ","pages":"Article 105116"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144702325","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Marcus Roesch , Michiel Gerritse , Bas Karreman , Frank van Oort , Bart Loog
{"title":"Do workers or firms drive the foreign acquisition wage gap?","authors":"Marcus Roesch , Michiel Gerritse , Bas Karreman , Frank van Oort , Bart Loog","doi":"10.1016/j.euroecorev.2025.105105","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.euroecorev.2025.105105","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Foreign-acquired firms pay higher wages. The wage gap may arise with worker composition (e.g., sorting of high-quality workers) or firm-level premia (e.g., productivity improvements). We propose a dynamic decomposition on The Netherlands’ universal employer–employee data to understand the drivers of the post-acquisition wage gap. The wage gap rises from 1% to 5% after the acquisition, and firm level premia account for roughly three-quarters of the gap. The contribution of the workforce composition is initially absent, but grows to one-fifth of the wage gap, driven solely by new hires. Firm-level premia associate with higher management pay, worker training, and firms’ internationalization strategies. We show how the implied relative importance of worker sorting and firm-level development varies with assumptions on the counterfactual of the acquisition.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48389,"journal":{"name":"European Economic Review","volume":"178 ","pages":"Article 105105"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144711636","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Warning words in a warming world: Central bank communication and climate change","authors":"Emanuele Campiglio , Jérôme Deyris , Davide Romelli , Ginevra Scalisi","doi":"10.1016/j.euroecorev.2025.105101","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.euroecorev.2025.105101","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We study climate-related central bank communication using a novel dataset containing 35,487 speeches delivered by 131 central banks from 1986 to 2023. We employ natural language processing techniques to identify and trace the evolution of key climate-related narratives centred around (i) green finance, and (ii) climate-related financial risks. We find that central bank public communication strategies are primarily driven by underlying institutional factors, rather than exposure to climate-related risks. We then study the impact of climate-related communication on financial market dynamics through both a portfolio and a firm-level analysis. We find that equity returns of ‘green’ firms outperform those of ‘dirty’ firms when central banks engage more frequently and intensely with climate-related topics.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48389,"journal":{"name":"European Economic Review","volume":"178 ","pages":"Article 105101"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144679553","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Unemployment dynamics and endogenous unemployment insurance extensions","authors":"W. Similan Rujiwattanapong","doi":"10.1016/j.euroecorev.2025.105106","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.euroecorev.2025.105106","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper investigates the general equilibrium effects of endogenous unemployment insurance (UI) extensions on the dynamics of unemployment and its duration in the US. Using a stochastic random-search-and-matching model with worker heterogeneity, I allow for the maximum UI duration to endogenously depend on unemployment, and for UI benefits to depend on worker characteristics replicating the US benefit system. The model is able to generate the observed incidence of (long-term) unemployment over the past six decades. Responses of job search to UI extensions (microeconomic effect of UI) are important for both long-term and total unemployment whilst responses of job separations (general equilibrium effect of UI) is important for total unemployment. Worker heterogeneity in terms of benefit levels is crucial for the unemployment duration dynamics via heterogeneous job finding rates. Disregarding the rational expectations of UI extensions may overestimate unemployment by almost 2 percentage points.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48389,"journal":{"name":"European Economic Review","volume":"178 ","pages":"Article 105106"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144739643","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Buried in the vaults of central banks–monetary gold hoarding and the slide into the Great Depression","authors":"Sören Karau","doi":"10.1016/j.euroecorev.2025.105095","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.euroecorev.2025.105095","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>I study the role of central bank gold hoarding as a cause for the initial slide into the Great Depression. The notion that monetary forces played an important role in bringing about the depression is well established among many economic historians, but has more recently met some skepticism by formal macroeconometric work. This paper models monetary disturbances as shocks to central bank gold demand, and adds narrative information on key events to sharpen shock identification, while making use of a newly-assembled monthly data set of the interwar world economy. Monetary shocks are found to play an important role in the collapse in prices and output during the initial slide into the Great Depression, whereas non-monetary factors deepened the downturn from 1931 onward.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48389,"journal":{"name":"European Economic Review","volume":"178 ","pages":"Article 105095"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-07-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144780141","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Startup acquisitions: Acquihires and talent hoarding","authors":"Jean-Michel Benkert , Igor Letina , Shuo Liu","doi":"10.1016/j.euroecorev.2025.105103","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.euroecorev.2025.105103","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We study how competitive forces may drive firms to inefficiently acquire startup talent. In our model, two rival firms have the capacity to acquire and integrate a startup operating in an orthogonal market. We show that firms may pursue such <em>acquihires</em> primarily as a preemptive strategy, even when they appear unprofitable in isolation. Thus, acquihires, even absent traditional competition-reducing effects, need not be benign, as they can lead to inefficient talent allocation. Additionally, our analysis underscores that such talent hoarding can diminish consumer surplus and exacerbate job volatility for acquihired employees.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48389,"journal":{"name":"European Economic Review","volume":"178 ","pages":"Article 105103"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-07-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144780315","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Do firms react to monetary policy in developing countries?","authors":"Djeneba Dramé , Florian Léon","doi":"10.1016/j.euroecorev.2025.105102","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.euroecorev.2025.105102","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper examines how firms in developing countries respond to monetary policy changes, focusing on both their perceptions of credit constraints and their borrowing behavior. Using firm-level data from the World Bank Enterprise Surveys (WBES) and a newly constructed database of monetary policy changes, we employ an event study approach to analyze how managers adjust their expectations of credit access in the days following a policy intervention. We complement this with a broader analysis of how annual policy rate changes affect firms’ credit applications. Our results show that firms perceive credit access as more restrictive after a policy rate hike, but do not significantly reduce their credit applications. Instead, credit demand increases after a rate cut, highlighting an asymmetric response to monetary policy. We also find substantial heterogeneity, with firms’ sensitivity depending not only on their proximity to banks, but also on the degree of liquidity of the banking market and the degree of independence of the central bank. These results provide new insights into the transmission of monetary policy in developing countries.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48389,"journal":{"name":"European Economic Review","volume":"178 ","pages":"Article 105102"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-07-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144654048","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}