Does capital-based regulation affect bank pricing policy?

Unlabelled: This paper tests whether a series of changes to capital requirements transmitted to a change to banks' pricing policy. We compile a rich bank-level supervisory dataset covering the banking sector in the Czech Republic over the period 2004-2019. We estimate that the changes to the overall capital requirements did not force banks to alter their pricing policy.

On the macrofinancial determinants of life and non-life insurance premiums.

This paper tests potential determinants of the development of the insurance sector. Using a rich dataset for 24 European countries spanning two decades, we identify a set of macrofinancial factors that are the most robust predictors of growth of gross premiums in the life and non-life insurance sectors. We show that both life and non-life premiums co-move with the business cycle and are positively related to higher savings and a more developed financial system.

What Does Really Drive Consumer Confidence?

Unlabelled: We construct a novel index of households' macroeconomic environment (HOME) based on the data from 22 high-income European countries between 2002 Q1 and 2018 Q4. The resulting index is in line with the broad features of the countries' business and financial cycles and captures well households' perception of their underlying economic situation. We discuss joint properties of the HOME index and the widely employed survey-based consumer confidence indicator.