The changing landscape of financial markets in Europe, the United States and Japan. Bruegel Working Paper 2013/02, 18 March 2013

We compare the structure of the financial sectors of the EU27, Japan and the United States, looking at a set of 23 indicators. We find a large variation within the European Union in the structure of the financial sector. Using principal components analysis, we identify robust groups of EU countries. One group consists of the eastern European members that entered the EU more recently.These have substantially smaller financial sectors than the old member states. A second group can be classified as market-based (MBEU) and the third group is more bank-based (BBEU). We compare US, MBEU, BBEU, Eastern EU and Japan with the following main results. First, the groups within Europe are geographically related. Second, in many indicators, MBEU countries are closer to the (market-based) US, while BBEU countries more closely resemble Japan. Paradoxically, however, market-based EU countries also have large banking sectors. Banks in market-based countries have larger cross-border assets and liabilities, and derive a larger fraction of their income from fees, rather than interest income, than banks in bank-based countries. Finally, for most indicators, the ordering of groups of countries is quite stable over time, but while the crisis has had no impact on the relative ordering of the groups, it has slightly widened the gap between the US and all EU regions insome respects. We also find that during the crisis, substitution between market-based and bank-based sources of finance occurred in the US, and to a lesser extent in MBEU and BBEU countries.

Cross-country insurance mechanisms in currency unions. Bruegel Working Paper 2014/04, 27 March 2014

Countries in a monetary union can adjust to shocks either through internal or external mechanisms. We quantitatively assess for the European Union a number of relevant mechanisms suggested by Mundell’s optimal currency area theory, and compare them to the United States. For this purpose, we update a number of empirical analyses in the economic literature that identify (1) the size of asymmetries across countries and (2) the magnitude of insurance mechanisms relative to similar mechanisms and compare results for the European Monetary Union (EMU) with those obtained for the US. To study the level of synchronization between EMU countries we follow Alesina et al. (2002) and Barro and Tenreyro (2007). To measure the effect of an employment shock on employment levels, unemployment rates and participation rates we perform an analysis based on Blanchard and Katz (1992) and Decressin and Fatas (1995). We measure consumption smoothing through capital markets, fiscal transfers and savings, using the approach by Asdrubali et al. (1996) and Afonso and Furceri (2007). To analyze risk sharing through a common safety net for banks we perform a rudimentary simulation analysis. |