The Asset Quality Review and Capital Needs: Why re-capitalise banks with public money? CEPS Policy Brief No. 311, 19 December 2013

It is generally assumed that any capital needs discovered by the Asset Quality Review the ECB is scheduled to finish by the end of 2014 should be filled by public funding (= fiscal backstop). This assumption is wrong, however. Banks that do not have enough capital should be asked to obtain it from the market; or be restructured using the procedures and rules recently agreed. The Directorate-General for Competition at the European Commission should be particularly vigilant to ensure that no further state aid flows to an already oversized European banking system. The case for a public backstop was strong when the entire euro area banking system was under stress, but this is no longer the case. Banks with a viable business model can find capital; those without should be closed because any public-sector re-capitalisation would likely mean throwing good money after bad.

An Investigation of Career Tenure in the European Parliament: Electoral, Party and Individual Considerations. ACES Working Papers, 2012

What explains the length of a Member of the European Parliament’s career? Little evidence of careerism has been uncovered in the European Parliament, particularly when compared to studies of legislator tenure in the U.S. Congress. Due to the different historical contexts in which these two legislatures developed, it seems reasonable to rule out many of the explanations used to account for increasing careerism in Congress in searching for the influences on legislator tenure in the European Parliament. This paper therefore proposes three potential models of careerism in the European Parliament: an electoral systems model, a party model, and an individual model. While the data necessary to test these models has not been fully compiled, this paper outlines the major hypotheses of each model and details plans for the operationalization of all independent and control variables. These models are not intended to be mutually exclusive alternatives, but rather each explanation is expected to influence each MEP in varying degrees.