Bulletin March 2008

IN THIS ISSUE...

Lessons from the 2007 financial crisis
CEPR Research Fellow Willem Buiter, a former member of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee, examines last year's financial 'perfect storm,' offers his own analysis of what brought it about, and delivers a robust critique of central banks and regulators' response.

Impatient procrastinators
CEPR Researchers Paula Sapienza and Luigi Zingales and co-author, Ernesto Reuben, used a series of experiments on students to probe the links between impatience and procrastination - two apparently conflicting character traits, which psychologists have more recently suggested are one and the same thing.

Resurrecting science in Europe
European governments have pledged to boost spending on research and development to 3% of GDP, in a deliberate attempt to improve the competitive position of the EU in knowledge-intensive industries. But a new CEPR paper argues that funding alone will not fix the parlous state of European science.

Sui Generis EMU?
CEPR Researcher Barry Eichengreen argues that EMU's peculiar conjunction of monetary union and financial integration, combined with a lack of political union, makes it uncharted territory, and warns against drawing too many conclusions from apparently similar phenomena from history. At the same time, Carlo Favero and Francesco Giavazzi suggest that the unique nature of the experiment should not preclude the ECB from taking more account of financial developments in the rest of the world when it sets interest rate policy.