The US Treasury recently published the first in a series of reports designed to implement the seven core principles for regulating the US financial system announced in an Executive Order from President Trump. While Trump's stated principles provide an attractive basis for making the financial system both more cost-effective and safer, this column argues...

Despite much being done to strengthen the Economic and Monetary Union, it remains incomplete and this is one of the main reasons for the Eurozone's lacklustre economic performance in the recent years. While there are still diverging views on how to "cross the river", there is also a political and economic window of opportunity to complete the EMU architecture....

Around the world, growth has yet to recover to its pre-Global Crisis trend. This column uses the crisis as a quasi-natural experiment to test the endogenous growth hypothesis, which suggests that output has not recovered because the crisis affected the rate of technological progress. Firms that preferred a bank that was more severely affected by the...

The nature of military and social conflict has changed in the last three decades, particularly in the way it impacts civilians locally. This column presents new research that models localised conflict based on the spatial configuration of groups, using evidence from conflict in Northern Ireland. The model can help target policies at the origin of attacks...

There is strong empirical evidence of a secular rise in intelligence, but a lack of consistently measured data has hampered the identification of a similar increase in non-cognitive skills. Based on an analysis of half a million Finnish males, this column presents evidence that a long-term increase in scores for traits such as self-confidence, sociability,...

Trade union membership has been declining since the 1980s. Recently, however, there has been renewed interest in the potential of collective bargaining to address rising wealth inequality and poor wage growth. This column presents an OECD report on collective bargaining institutions and practices across member countries and selected emerging economies....