Jesus Crespo Cuaresma

Reserve requirements and economic growth

Reserve requirements, as a tool of macroprudential policy, have been increasingly employed since the outbreak of the great financial crisis. Jesús Crespo Cuaresma, joint with Gregor von Schweinitz and Katharina Wendt, have conducted an analysis of the effect of reserve requirements in tranquil and crisis times on long-run growth rates of GDP per capita and credit (percentage of GDP) making use of Bayesian model averaging methods. Their study, which was recently published in the Journal of Macroeconomics, found that regulation has, on average, a negative effect on GDP in tranquil times, which is only partly offset by a positive (but not robust effect) in crisis times. Credit over GDP is positively affected by higher requirements in the longer run.

Mr. Crespo Cuaresma’s research interests are in the fields of applied econometrics, macroeconomics, economic growth, human capital and economic policy. He has worked on issues related to the determinants of macroeconomic productivity differences across and within countries, in particular on the role played by human capital and population dynamics on economic growth and development.

During his stay at CESifo, Jesús Crespo Cuarresma is planning to work on a project related to the estimation of fiscal multipliers in the presence of model uncertainty. In particular, he is studying the role played by the modeling choices of econometricians on the size of estimated government spending and tax multipliers in the framework of structural vector autoregressive models.

Jesús Crespo Cuaresma is Professor of Economics at the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU), Director of Economic Analysis at the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital (WIC), as well as a research scholar at the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA). He studied Economics at the University of Sevilla and got his PhD at the University of Vienna. He first full professorship was at the University of Innsbruck. He has published numerous articles in leading journals such as Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), European Economic Review, Journal of Applied Econometrics, Demography or the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, among others. He acts as a scientific consultant to the World Bank and the Austrian Institute of Economic Research.