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Europe means variety. This is fascinating but also challenging. Nationalism is on the rise again. But backtracking is no solution for any of Europe’s problems.

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Hans-Helmut Kotz

Resident Faculty & Seminar Chair
Room 206
work (617) 998-5407
Website
https://www.macro.uni-freiburg.de/team
Back to directory

Hans-Helmut Kotz

Resident Faculty & Seminar Chair
Room 206
work (617) 998-5407
Website
https://www.macro.uni-freiburg.de/team
Hans-Helmut Kotz

Biography

Hans-Helmut Kotz

Hans-Helmut Kotz is a visiting professor of economics at Harvard University, where he has been teaching a course on the Economics of European Integration during the fall semester since 2010. At Goethe University Frankfurt, Kotz is a senior fellow of the Leibniz Institute for Financial Research SAFE. He is also on the economics faculty of Freiburg University, where he teaches monetary economics. In addition to his academic positions, Kotz is a senior advisor to McKinsey & Co., an academic advisor to the McKinsey Global Institute, as well as a non-executive member of the board of Caixa General de Depósitos, Lisbon.

Between 2002 and April 2010, Kotz was a member of the executive board of the Deutsche Bundesbank, in charge of financial stability, markets and statistics and a member of committees of the Bank for International Settlements, the Financial Stability Board as well as the OECD, where he was chair of the financial markets committee. He was also the German Central Bank deputy for the G7/G8 and the G20 process. Between 2002 and 2005 he served in a personal capacity as a member of the European Parliament’s expert group on financial markets. He has published widely and is involved in a number of academic institutions, e.g., member of the board of the Konstanz Seminar on Monetary Theory; member of the scientific councils of the Paris-based Revue d’économie financière and the Centre Cournot; the advisory board of Credit and Capital Markets and the editorial board of Vierteljahrshefte zur Wirtschaftsforschung, Deutsches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung in Berlin.

At the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Kotz chairs the European Economic Policy Forum.

Affiliations

  • Visiting Professor of Economics, Resident Faculty, & Seminar Chair, Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University
  • Member of the Executive Board, German Bundesbank (2002-2012)

Fall Course:

Economics of European Integrations (Econ 1432)

Select Journal Publications

  • Beck, Günther W., Kotz, Hans-Helmut, and Zabelina, Natalia. "Price gaps at the border: Evidence from multi-country household scanner data." In: Journal of International Economics.
  • Kotz, Hans-Helmut (with Dorothea Schäfer): Diversity across EU banking sectors: Poorly researched and underappreciated, Vierteljahrshefte zur Wirtschaftsforschung, Vol. 87 (4, 2018), pp. 153–179.
  • Kotz, Hans-Helmut, Semmler, Willi, and Tahri, Ibrahim. "Financial fragmentation, and the monetary transmission mechanism in the euro area: a smooth transition VAR approach." Studies in Nonlinear Dynamics and Econometrics, vol. 22 (5, SI; 2018), pp. 1-19.
  • Kotz, Hans-Helmut, and Maier, Charles S. "Prudentes et courageuses: les tentatives de l’Europe en faveur de l’intégration." Revue d’Économie Financière. vol. 125 (2017), pp. 55-68.
  • Kotz, Hans-Helmut, Semmler, Willi, and Tahri, Ibrahim. "Capital Markets Union and monetary policy performance: comes financial market variety at a cost?" Vierteljahrshefte zur Wirtschaftsforschung, Vol. 86 (2, 2017), pp. 41–59.
  • Kotz, Hans-Helmut. "Regulating banking – banks and beyond." Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Rechtswissenschaften (2017).
  • Kotz, Hans-Helmut, and Schmidt, Reinhard H. "Corporate Governance of Banks – A German Alternative to the Standard Model." Zeitschrift für Bankrecht und Bankwirtschaft. Vol. 28 (2017), pp. 427-444.
  • Beck, Günther, and Kotz, Hans-Helmut. "Les activités de shadow banking dans un contexte de bas taux d‘intérêt : une perspective de flux financiers." Revue d’Économie Financière. (2016) no. 121, pp. 235-254.
  • Kotz, Hans-Helmut. "The State and Its Banks – De-Coupling, a Vain Hope?" Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Rechtswissenschaften. Vol. 113 (2014).

Edited Volumes

  • Beck, Günther, and Kotz, Hans-Helmut. "Conducting Monetary Policy when Fiscal Space is Limited." In: Rethinking Monetary – Fiscal Policy Coordination. Ljubljana/Washington, DC: IMF-Bank of Slovenia, 2017.
  • Kotz, Hans-Helmut. "Monetary Union, Banking Union: Money and Credit, Inexorably Linked." In: Monetary Policy, Banking Union and Economic Growth: Challenges for Europe in the Wake of the Crisis. Lucas Papademos (editor). Athens: Academy of Athens and Bank of Greece, 2017.
  • Kotz, Hans-Helmut. "Communicating statistics – It’s more than numbers. European Central Bank: Towards the banking union – opportunities and challenges." Frankfurt: Seventh ECB Conference on Statistics, 2015.
  • Kotz, Hans-Helmut. "Le couple franco-allemand: (més-)entente cordiale?" France-Allemagne: cultures monétaires et budgétaires; vers une nouvelle gouvernance européenne? Cergy-Pontoise: CIRAC, (2015) pp. 47-59.
  • Kotz, Hans-Helmut. "SSM and ECB: Supra-Nationalization of Banking Politics." Österreichische Nationalbank. 42nd Economic Conference, (2014) pp. 4-12.
  • Kotz, Hans-Helmut. "EMU’s Response to the North Atlantic Financial Crisis: Policymaking from Incompatible Views." In: Europe’s Economic Crisis: Transatlantic Perspectives. Robert Solow, and Daniel S. Hamilton (editors). Washington, DC: Center for Transatlantic Relations, (2012) pp. 29-44.

VOX EU Contributions

Several chapters in this e-book were published as a result of a workshop that was organize at CES in April 2017. For details and a list of participants, see the agenda of "Workshop: Incompatible Economic Philosophies: German Ordo vs. U.S. Pragmatism."

Recent Newspaper Articles

Awards

  • Prix Turgot (Category: Ouvrages collectifs), Cercle Turgot, Paris, March 2017
  • Excellence in Teaching Award, Derek Bok Center, Harvard University, Fall 2015
  • University Teaching Award, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, 2010
 

News

Allemagne: des petits partis devenus grands
Option Finance on November 1, 2021

Depuis au moins le début de ce siècle, on constate une restructuration des systèmes politiques en Europe.

Germany versus the ECB
Project Syndicate on October 10, 2019

With the German economy close to recession, European Central Bank President Mario Draghi has rightly urged eurozone governments to provide more fiscal stimulus. And acknowledging the interaction between fiscal and monetary policy would leave critics much less room for ECB-bashing, argues Hans-Helmut Kotz in recent piece in Project Syndicate. "In influencing economic activity, fiscal and monetary policy interact inexorably. Their joint impact is mediated through what the great economist James Tobin called a “common funnel”. In the eurozone, however, the policy debate regularly ignores this interaction between one monetary policy and 19 fiscal policies. Acknowledging it, however, would leave critics with much less room for ECB-bashing."

eBook: Ordoliberalism: A German oddity?
VOX | CEPR's Policy Portal on December 12, 2017

The Eurozone crisis has opened fault lines between German economists and policymakers and those in a number of Eurozone (in particular periphery) countries. A new eBook – published as a result of a workshop at CES – explains the historical development of the ordoliberal school of economics and its influence on German policymaking, and contrasting it critically with what we like to call the Anglo-Saxon-Latin pragmatism of economic policymaking.

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