policy work and consulting
Policy work:I was part of the inquiry that proposed the creation of the Austrian Financial Market Authority. (Here is the report of the inquiry.) Ever since, I've been interested in (non-partisan) policy work. Here are some reference projects:
- An analysis of best practice in bank
governance, on behalf of the
Austrian
Savings Banks Association
(with Michael Halling & Josef Zechner).
- A green paper on market-based instruments for financing small and medium sized enterprises
(SMEs), sponsored by
the Austrian Ministry of Finance.
Here is a summary. Here are the
slides of a recent talk on financing SMEs.
- A proposal for a reform of the Austrian pension system, sponsored
by the Julius-Raab Stiftung, part of a wider-ranging proposal for
capital market reform: abstract,
press coverage
- An evaluation of an Austrian subsidy
program
for
financially
distressed SMEs that
are subject to weather-related risks.
Many economic theories predict market outcomes as consequences of asymmetries of information across investors, financial institutions, regulators, etc. The predictions are (obviously) hard to test because the requisite data are not publicly available.
One way to overcome this problem is to find a data sponsor. For example, Schnigge AG provided key data for two analyses of when-issued trading prior to German IPOs: Cornelli, Goldreich, and Ljungqvist (Journal of Finance, 2005) and Aussenegg, Pichler, and Stomper (Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, 2006). Alternatively, I combine data collection with consulting. I've been involved in a number of projects that required data collection and generated results of practical relevance, mainly in the area of credit risk modeling.