Bank Resolution Mechanisms Conference (recordings of talks, slides, papers now available)

Bank Resolution Mechanisms Conference

23 May 2013, Institute of Bankers, Dublin 1

A joint academic-practitioner conference with the theme Bank Resolution Mechanisms was held in Dublin on Thursday 23 May 2013, organised by the Financial Mathematics and Computation Cluster (FMC2), the Department of Economics, Finance & Accounting at National University of Ireland Maynooth and the UCD School of Business at University College Dublin.

Speakers included:

Ajai Chopra (International Monetary Fund), Patrick Honohan (Governor, Central Bank of Ireland), Zhenyu Wang (University of Indiana), Viral Acharya (New York University)

Talk details including slides, related papers and recordings of the talks can be downloaded from the conference webpage:

http://fmc-cluster.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=203

Property Tax

IMF survey paper here.

Summary: The tax on immovable property has been characterized as probably the most unpopular among tax instruments, in part because it is salient and hard to avoid. But economists continue to emphasize the virtues of the property tax owing to its relatively low efficiency costs, benign impact on growth, and high score on fairness. It is, therefore, generally considered to be underutilized in most countries. This paper takes stock of the arguments for using real property taxation, and presents an updated data-set for high-and middle income countries to illustrate its use. It also reflects the renewed and widespread interest in property tax reform globally, and discusses the many policy and administrative issues that must be carefully considered as prerequisites for successful property tax reform.

F&D: Profile of Carmen Reinhart

The June issue of Finance&Development is here.  It includes a profile of Carmen Reinhart here.

Scottish Constitution Blog

David Bell in Stirling has recently launched a blog on economic and policy issues surrounding the Scottish Constitutional debate. A link to the blog is here and it is already turning into a very useful source of information and insight on the key issue dominating Scottish public debate at present. There is obviously quite a lot of discussion ongoing about the lessons to be learned from the Irish experience including yesterday’s post on what would happen to national debt in a post-independence environment. Would be interested in people’s views on how Irish experiences more generally across policy domains should impact on the Scottish debate.

Never ending Irish success?

Paul Krugman has a thoughtful post (ht Niamh Hardiman) on Ireland’s role as poster child for austerity. He points out that those in power continually cite Ireland’s imminent recovery as proof things are getting better and sticking to their plan works. Paul doesn’t mention our lack of fiscal headroom or the need for fiscal consolidation of *some* kind–whatever that might be-but I think it’s implicit.

At any rate, his point is more about how Ireland is used as an example of what great things austerity policies can achieve, when clearly, they can’t. At least, not on their own.