Matthias Thiemann
Biographic Data
| ID | 281792 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Matthias Thiemann |
| GIVEN NAMES | Matthias |
| FAMILY NAME | Thiemann |
| SIGNATURE | THIEMANN M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0386-1976 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 265 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 22 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Too contested to avoid, too complex to normalise
International audience
The rise of the European Enlargement State
In the green trenches
International audience
Central Bankers as Migrating Birds
The Eurosystem is built on a compelling promise: shielded from national politics, ECB Governing Council members would be better positioned to deploy their science‐based expertise. Far from embodying this ideal, scholars have documented central bankers' opportunistic engagement with the ideas underpinning monetary policy. Whilst studies have often attributed this to reputation management strategies, we show how deeply entrenched national preferenc…
The Icarian Rise of Central Banks
La loi « Morin » relative à la reconnaissance et à l’indemnisation des victimes des essais nucléaires français est votée en 2010, après une décennie de mobilisations. Si le ministère de la Défense soutient qu’elle facilite l’accès à la réparation, cette loi porte également la promesse d’adosser la décision aux connaissances épidémiologiques relatives au risque radioinduit. Cet article analyse comment les experts scientifiques chargés d’évaluer le…
Taming the real estate boom in the EU
In the fallout of the 2008 crisis, macroprudential policy has been installed as the policy remedy against future financial instability, a primary focus being developments in the real estate sector. With house prices consistently rising in the EU since 2014, causing alarm among macroprudential supervisory bodies, a core question of EU regulatory governance is how far macroprudential bodies have been capable of bringing about countercyclical action…
Bridging the gaping hole
How has mainstream academic economic discourse evolved to regain its epistemic authority after the financial crisis of 2008 revealed serious blind spots in economic modelling that shattered the profession's claim to be able to predict and control macroeconomic variables? To answer this question, we combine content with bibliometric analyses of nearly 70,000 papers on macroeconomics and finance published in academic journals from 1990 to 2019. The…
Between technocracy and politics
Implementing precautionary measures that have obvious distributional consequences today but often only invisible future benefits is politically difficult. It requires that policymakers reconcile technocratic expertise with political consent. This paper traces attempts to enact such measures, focusing on countercyclical policies to limit the systemic risks of housing booms as proposed by financial stability committees in Germany, France, and the N…
Beyond market neutrality? Central banks and the problem of climate change
Starting with a landmark speech by Mark Carney on the 'Tragedy of the Horizon' in 2015, climate change entered central banking discourse, causing some of its key convictions to come under new scrutiny. This article traces how initially climate change was firmly embedded in a conventional framework of 'market completion' that would allow financial markets to price in negative externality. Yet, over the course of the last seven years, central banks…
Investing in the single market? Core-periphery dynamics and the hybrid governance of supranational investment policies
This article examines the impact of supranational investment policies on the resilience of the common market project and its impact on core-periphery dynamics. Reconstructing the hybrid governance processes around the Investment Plan for Europe (2015–2020) and its geographical distribution, it finds that these policies were effective in channelling funds to the Southern periphery after the Eurozone crisis, but aggravated the core-periphery dynami…
Recentering central banks
Growth at risk
Post-crisis, central banks were encouraged to intervene against the cyclical build up of systemic risks in the financial system, a mandate which contravened previous conceptions of the state-economy boundary. This paper traces how central bank economists forged an analytical apparatus that could guide and legitimize such central bank interventions, detailing how their work involved forging new connections between actors within the boundary zone b…
Measuring and mitigating systemic risks
After the great financial crisis of 2007–2009, central banks were handed a macroprudential mandate to contain systemic risks, a mandate seen as endangering their independence due to expected distributional conflicts. At the same time, depoliticization through scientific expertise was largely foreclosed, as systemic risk was a largely undefined concept. This paper focuses on how central banks dealt with this conundrum. It examines the scientific d…
Open for Business
In 2013, the Governor of the Bank of England heralded that the Bank of England is ‘open for business’: ready to buy and sell every asset it can value, thereby adjusting the role of the Bank of England to the demands of market-based finance. This article examines this re-articulation of the role of central banks in financial markets, situating it in the context of the recently enacted Basel III regulatory reforms. By placing a regulatory price on …
Building a hidden investment state? The European Investment Bank, national development banks and European economic governance
The European Commission’s Investment Plan for Europe and the enduring economic crisis has brought state-owned development banks again to the fore of public and scholarly debate in Europe. This article proposes to place these banks’ activities and recent institutional co-operation in the context of European integration and assumes a historical perspective on European economic governance and development banking. Most importantly, it argues that the…
Is resilience enough? The macroprudential reform agenda and the lack of smoothing of the cycle
After the financial crisis, central banks were entrusted with implementing an ambitious macroprudential reform agenda. The goal was arguably twofold: to increase the resilience of the financial system and to lower the amplitudes of the financial cycle. A decade later, the implementation of the agenda is characterized by the pursuit of measures to raise the resilience of the financial system, while tools to smoothen the cycle have been rather side…
Much Ado About Nothing? Macro-Prudential Ideas and the Post-Crisis Regulation of Shadow Banking
On the constitutive effects of contingent associations
Proposing a non-moralistic critique of the changes to neoliberal capitalism post-crisis, Konings provides a refreshing take on the dynamics of financial governance, emphasizing the way linkages between state and finance are structured by a speculative logic internal to neoliberalism. In this essay, I raise a number of questions about this characterization of neoliberalism, focusing on issues of agency and durability. First, does the turn to syste…
Stitched on the Edge
While the role of laws and regulations in structuring markets is well established, it is less understood how rule evasion affects the evolution of markets or how the interaction between regulators and the regulated about the meaning of compliance influences this effect. The authors study this issue by looking at the development of the asset-backed commercial paper (ABCP) market in France, Germany, and the Netherlands from 1999 to 2009. In all thr…
In the Shadow of Basel
What if global governance mechanisms undermine the capacity of national banking regulators to deal with the deviant activities of their banks? Such was the case, this paper argues with respect to the Basel Accords and the regulation of the bank-based shadow-banking system. Securitization-activities by banks, driven by regulatory arbitrage have been an integral part of the shadow banking sector and a central transmission mechanism during the finan…
Is the Whole More than the Sum of its Parts
Networks and Meaning
Der Aufsatz setzt Niklas Luhmanns Systemtheorie in Beziehung zur soziologischen Netzwerkanalyse, um Grundlagen für eine allgemeine Netzwerktheorie zu entwickeln. Er beginnt mit Luhmanns Diskussion von Sinn als einer zentralen Kategorie der Soziologie. Luhmanns Formulierung wird erweitert von einem Fokus auf die Dyade und doppelte Kontingenz hin zur Reichweite von Netzwerken und daher multipler Kontingenz. Während Kommunikations- und Handlungsaspe…
Building a hidden investment state? The European Investment Bank, national development banks and European economic governance
The European Commission’s Investment Plan for Europe and the enduring economic crisis has brought state-owned development banks again to the fore of public and scholarly debate in Europe. This article proposes to place these banks’ activities and recent institutional co-operation in the context of European integration and assumes a historical perspective on European economic governance and development banking. Most importantly, it argues that the…
Recentering central banks
Is resilience enough? The macroprudential reform agenda and the lack of smoothing of the cycle
After the financial crisis, central banks were entrusted with implementing an ambitious macroprudential reform agenda. The goal was arguably twofold: to increase the resilience of the financial system and to lower the amplitudes of the financial cycle. A decade later, the implementation of the agenda is characterized by the pursuit of measures to raise the resilience of the financial system, while tools to smoothen the cycle have been rather side…
Stitched on the Edge
While the role of laws and regulations in structuring markets is well established, it is less understood how rule evasion affects the evolution of markets or how the interaction between regulators and the regulated about the meaning of compliance influences this effect. The authors study this issue by looking at the development of the asset-backed commercial paper (ABCP) market in France, Germany, and the Netherlands from 1999 to 2009. In all thr…
Measuring and mitigating systemic risks
After the great financial crisis of 2007–2009, central banks were handed a macroprudential mandate to contain systemic risks, a mandate seen as endangering their independence due to expected distributional conflicts. At the same time, depoliticization through scientific expertise was largely foreclosed, as systemic risk was a largely undefined concept. This paper focuses on how central banks dealt with this conundrum. It examines the scientific d…
Networks and Meaning
Der Aufsatz setzt Niklas Luhmanns Systemtheorie in Beziehung zur soziologischen Netzwerkanalyse, um Grundlagen für eine allgemeine Netzwerktheorie zu entwickeln. Er beginnt mit Luhmanns Diskussion von Sinn als einer zentralen Kategorie der Soziologie. Luhmanns Formulierung wird erweitert von einem Fokus auf die Dyade und doppelte Kontingenz hin zur Reichweite von Netzwerken und daher multipler Kontingenz. Während Kommunikations- und Handlungsaspe…
In the Shadow of Basel
What if global governance mechanisms undermine the capacity of national banking regulators to deal with the deviant activities of their banks? Such was the case, this paper argues with respect to the Basel Accords and the regulation of the bank-based shadow-banking system. Securitization-activities by banks, driven by regulatory arbitrage have been an integral part of the shadow banking sector and a central transmission mechanism during the finan…
Growth at risk
Post-crisis, central banks were encouraged to intervene against the cyclical build up of systemic risks in the financial system, a mandate which contravened previous conceptions of the state-economy boundary. This paper traces how central bank economists forged an analytical apparatus that could guide and legitimize such central bank interventions, detailing how their work involved forging new connections between actors within the boundary zone b…
Beyond market neutrality? Central banks and the problem of climate change
Starting with a landmark speech by Mark Carney on the 'Tragedy of the Horizon' in 2015, climate change entered central banking discourse, causing some of its key convictions to come under new scrutiny. This article traces how initially climate change was firmly embedded in a conventional framework of 'market completion' that would allow financial markets to price in negative externality. Yet, over the course of the last seven years, central banks…
Open for Business
In 2013, the Governor of the Bank of England heralded that the Bank of England is ‘open for business’: ready to buy and sell every asset it can value, thereby adjusting the role of the Bank of England to the demands of market-based finance. This article examines this re-articulation of the role of central banks in financial markets, situating it in the context of the recently enacted Basel III regulatory reforms. By placing a regulatory price on …
Between technocracy and politics
Implementing precautionary measures that have obvious distributional consequences today but often only invisible future benefits is politically difficult. It requires that policymakers reconcile technocratic expertise with political consent. This paper traces attempts to enact such measures, focusing on countercyclical policies to limit the systemic risks of housing booms as proposed by financial stability committees in Germany, France, and the N…
The rise of the European Enlargement State
Central Bankers as Migrating Birds
The Eurosystem is built on a compelling promise: shielded from national politics, ECB Governing Council members would be better positioned to deploy their science‐based expertise. Far from embodying this ideal, scholars have documented central bankers' opportunistic engagement with the ideas underpinning monetary policy. Whilst studies have often attributed this to reputation management strategies, we show how deeply entrenched national preferenc…
Bridging the gaping hole
How has mainstream academic economic discourse evolved to regain its epistemic authority after the financial crisis of 2008 revealed serious blind spots in economic modelling that shattered the profession's claim to be able to predict and control macroeconomic variables? To answer this question, we combine content with bibliometric analyses of nearly 70,000 papers on macroeconomics and finance published in academic journals from 1990 to 2019. The…
Investing in the single market? Core-periphery dynamics and the hybrid governance of supranational investment policies
This article examines the impact of supranational investment policies on the resilience of the common market project and its impact on core-periphery dynamics. Reconstructing the hybrid governance processes around the Investment Plan for Europe (2015–2020) and its geographical distribution, it finds that these policies were effective in channelling funds to the Southern periphery after the Eurozone crisis, but aggravated the core-periphery dynami…
Taming the real estate boom in the EU
In the fallout of the 2008 crisis, macroprudential policy has been installed as the policy remedy against future financial instability, a primary focus being developments in the real estate sector. With house prices consistently rising in the EU since 2014, causing alarm among macroprudential supervisory bodies, a core question of EU regulatory governance is how far macroprudential bodies have been capable of bringing about countercyclical action…
Much Ado About Nothing? Macro-Prudential Ideas and the Post-Crisis Regulation of Shadow Banking
In the green trenches
International audience
On the constitutive effects of contingent associations
Proposing a non-moralistic critique of the changes to neoliberal capitalism post-crisis, Konings provides a refreshing take on the dynamics of financial governance, emphasizing the way linkages between state and finance are structured by a speculative logic internal to neoliberalism. In this essay, I raise a number of questions about this characterization of neoliberalism, focusing on issues of agency and durability. First, does the turn to syste…
Networks and Meaning
Der Aufsatz setzt Niklas Luhmanns Systemtheorie in Beziehung zur soziologischen Netzwerkanalyse, um Grundlagen für eine allgemeine Netzwerktheorie zu entwickeln. Er beginnt mit Luhmanns Diskussion von Sinn als einer zentralen Kategorie der Soziologie. Luhmanns Formulierung wird erweitert von einem Fokus auf die Dyade und doppelte Kontingenz hin zur Reichweite von Netzwerken und daher multipler Kontingenz. Während Kommunikations- und Handlungsaspe…
Is the Whole More than the Sum of its Parts
In the Shadow of Basel
What if global governance mechanisms undermine the capacity of national banking regulators to deal with the deviant activities of their banks? Such was the case, this paper argues with respect to the Basel Accords and the regulation of the bank-based shadow-banking system. Securitization-activities by banks, driven by regulatory arbitrage have been an integral part of the shadow banking sector and a central transmission mechanism during the finan…
Stitched on the Edge
While the role of laws and regulations in structuring markets is well established, it is less understood how rule evasion affects the evolution of markets or how the interaction between regulators and the regulated about the meaning of compliance influences this effect. The authors study this issue by looking at the development of the asset-backed commercial paper (ABCP) market in France, Germany, and the Netherlands from 1999 to 2009. In all thr…
Is resilience enough? The macroprudential reform agenda and the lack of smoothing of the cycle
After the financial crisis, central banks were entrusted with implementing an ambitious macroprudential reform agenda. The goal was arguably twofold: to increase the resilience of the financial system and to lower the amplitudes of the financial cycle. A decade later, the implementation of the agenda is characterized by the pursuit of measures to raise the resilience of the financial system, while tools to smoothen the cycle have been rather side…
Much Ado About Nothing? Macro-Prudential Ideas and the Post-Crisis Regulation of Shadow Banking
On the constitutive effects of contingent associations
Proposing a non-moralistic critique of the changes to neoliberal capitalism post-crisis, Konings provides a refreshing take on the dynamics of financial governance, emphasizing the way linkages between state and finance are structured by a speculative logic internal to neoliberalism. In this essay, I raise a number of questions about this characterization of neoliberalism, focusing on issues of agency and durability. First, does the turn to syste…
Open for Business
In 2013, the Governor of the Bank of England heralded that the Bank of England is ‘open for business’: ready to buy and sell every asset it can value, thereby adjusting the role of the Bank of England to the demands of market-based finance. This article examines this re-articulation of the role of central banks in financial markets, situating it in the context of the recently enacted Basel III regulatory reforms. By placing a regulatory price on …
Building a hidden investment state? The European Investment Bank, national development banks and European economic governance
The European Commission’s Investment Plan for Europe and the enduring economic crisis has brought state-owned development banks again to the fore of public and scholarly debate in Europe. This article proposes to place these banks’ activities and recent institutional co-operation in the context of European integration and assumes a historical perspective on European economic governance and development banking. Most importantly, it argues that the…
Measuring and mitigating systemic risks
After the great financial crisis of 2007–2009, central banks were handed a macroprudential mandate to contain systemic risks, a mandate seen as endangering their independence due to expected distributional conflicts. At the same time, depoliticization through scientific expertise was largely foreclosed, as systemic risk was a largely undefined concept. This paper focuses on how central banks dealt with this conundrum. It examines the scientific d…
Investing in the single market? Core-periphery dynamics and the hybrid governance of supranational investment policies
This article examines the impact of supranational investment policies on the resilience of the common market project and its impact on core-periphery dynamics. Reconstructing the hybrid governance processes around the Investment Plan for Europe (2015–2020) and its geographical distribution, it finds that these policies were effective in channelling funds to the Southern periphery after the Eurozone crisis, but aggravated the core-periphery dynami…
Recentering central banks
Growth at risk
Post-crisis, central banks were encouraged to intervene against the cyclical build up of systemic risks in the financial system, a mandate which contravened previous conceptions of the state-economy boundary. This paper traces how central bank economists forged an analytical apparatus that could guide and legitimize such central bank interventions, detailing how their work involved forging new connections between actors within the boundary zone b…
Between technocracy and politics
Implementing precautionary measures that have obvious distributional consequences today but often only invisible future benefits is politically difficult. It requires that policymakers reconcile technocratic expertise with political consent. This paper traces attempts to enact such measures, focusing on countercyclical policies to limit the systemic risks of housing booms as proposed by financial stability committees in Germany, France, and the N…
Beyond market neutrality? Central banks and the problem of climate change
Starting with a landmark speech by Mark Carney on the 'Tragedy of the Horizon' in 2015, climate change entered central banking discourse, causing some of its key convictions to come under new scrutiny. This article traces how initially climate change was firmly embedded in a conventional framework of 'market completion' that would allow financial markets to price in negative externality. Yet, over the course of the last seven years, central banks…
The Icarian Rise of Central Banks
La loi « Morin » relative à la reconnaissance et à l’indemnisation des victimes des essais nucléaires français est votée en 2010, après une décennie de mobilisations. Si le ministère de la Défense soutient qu’elle facilite l’accès à la réparation, cette loi porte également la promesse d’adosser la décision aux connaissances épidémiologiques relatives au risque radioinduit. Cet article analyse comment les experts scientifiques chargés d’évaluer le…
Taming the real estate boom in the EU
In the fallout of the 2008 crisis, macroprudential policy has been installed as the policy remedy against future financial instability, a primary focus being developments in the real estate sector. With house prices consistently rising in the EU since 2014, causing alarm among macroprudential supervisory bodies, a core question of EU regulatory governance is how far macroprudential bodies have been capable of bringing about countercyclical action…
Bridging the gaping hole
How has mainstream academic economic discourse evolved to regain its epistemic authority after the financial crisis of 2008 revealed serious blind spots in economic modelling that shattered the profession's claim to be able to predict and control macroeconomic variables? To answer this question, we combine content with bibliometric analyses of nearly 70,000 papers on macroeconomics and finance published in academic journals from 1990 to 2019. The…
Too contested to avoid, too complex to normalise
International audience
The rise of the European Enlargement State
In the green trenches
International audience
Central Bankers as Migrating Birds
The Eurosystem is built on a compelling promise: shielded from national politics, ECB Governing Council members would be better positioned to deploy their science‐based expertise. Far from embodying this ideal, scholars have documented central bankers' opportunistic engagement with the ideas underpinning monetary policy. Whilst studies have often attributed this to reputation management strategies, we show how deeply entrenched national preferenc…
Economics (19 works) · Political science (13 works) · Global Financial Regulation and Crises (12 works) · Financial system (11 works) · Banking stability, regulation, efficiency (10 works) · Business (10 works) · Finance (10 works) · Corporate governance (8 works) · Financial crisis (7 works) · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism (7 works)