Banks have failed societies on a massive scale. This came with enormous societal costs – and it was the main reason for a substantial overhaul of regulatory and supervisory systems worldwide. In Europe, in the wake of the crisis, a Banking Union has been established. This means a supra-nationalization of supervision and bank restructuring as well as a harmonization of deposit insurance. Still, a lot remains to be done. In fact, the risk of a systemic accident is disconcertingly high. And this appears to be a logical upshot of the way large banks deploy their risk-management tools. Inevitably, this comes with consequences for European economies’ capacity to grow. We will discuss perspectives on European banking with Thomas Gehrig, chair of the Department of Finance, University of Vienna and Faculty Member of the Vienna Graduate School of Finance.
Professor Gehrig has a PhD from the London School of Economics, he was Assistant and Associate Professor at Basel University and subsequently taught at Northwestern University, Evanston. Between 1997 and 2010, he was Director of the Institute for Research in Economic Development, Freiburg University. He held Visiting positions at Princeton, Tilburg, Helsinki, Rice and Wharton as well as at the Fed Minneapolis. He is a member of the Center for Economic Policy Research, London, the European Corporate Governance Institute, Brussels and the National Bureau of Economic Research, Boston. Focusing on the consequences of information asymmetries for the stability of financial markets, financial crises in a historical perspective, industrial economics of banking and stock exchanges, financial market regulation as well as the geography of exchanges, his work has been published in the European Economic Review, Review of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Reuve d’Économie Financière, Kredit und Kapital etc.).
