The objective of this chapter is to discuss the productivity implications of the financial and economic crises experienced by euro area economies since 2007. The argument is organized in three parts: the first discusses the euro crises and policy responses; the second focuses on the productivity slowdown; and the third examines productivity convergence in the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). The main conclusion is that the currently available evidence suggests that the crises in the euro area caused neither the productivity slowdown nor the disruptions in convergence patterns. Although this may well be because it is ‘still too early to tell’, the crises had a significant dampening effect: the productivity rebound that often follows recessions is yet to materialize, thus raising severe concerns in terms of convergence, integration, and welfare.

The ECB has already taken the step from ‘a monetary policy rule’ towards a broad central bank with monetary and financial tasks. The next step is to green these monetary and financial stability tasks. This chapter argues that a change from the prevailing ‘market economics’ paradigm to a ‘green economics’ paradigm will make this transformation effective. Sustainability challenges are complex in nature and have a long horizon. On the financial side, the ECB should ‘de-risk the financial system’ by greening its financial stability and supervision tasks. The chapter provides an overview of the new financial instruments and their application by the ECB. On the monetary side, the ECB is still adopting a two-pronged strategy: a risk approach and an allocational approach. While the risk approach fits within market economics thinking, the green economics paradigm suggests an allocational approach whereby the ECB moves from high-carbon to low-carbon assets in its monetary policy operations. The allocational approach is gaining ground.

This chapter discusses the ongoing enterprise of developing typologies of writing systems, which strives to propose a coherent framework for classifying the world’s diverse writing systems. Because different theoretical assumptions about the core entities under analysis can yield divergent proposals, it is valuable to continually assess the conceptual and terminology contrasts that both shape and communicate typology proposals. Therefore, this chapter examines the underlying conceptualizations, the diverse, and often inconsistent, terminology, and the main limitations of existing typologies of writing systems, to further elucidate the materialization of written language both diachronically and synchronically. The substantial third section illustrates how the majority of typology proposals classify writing systems primarily in terms of a core set of representational principles, or mapping relationships, assumed to exist between the linguistic units and graphemes of a language. After commenting on the elusive trinity of key terms (writing system, script and orthography), this section outlines some of the most influential, controversial and promising typology proposals and reflects on the various conceptual and terminological distinctions propounded to capture the principles of representational mapping. The last section of the chapter briefly considers the merits of exploring complementary or alternative approaches to writing system typologies.

This chapter gives an overview of different approaches to data collection. Three methods of comparative variable studies are presented in detail and illustrated with examples from the early history of printing: intratextual, intertextual and cross-textual variable analyses. Intratextual variable analysis investigates the frequency and range of spelling variants in a single text copy and is particularly useful for the detection of possible internal factors that trigger the choice of a variant. The intertextual analytical method compares the results of two or more intratextual investigations, for example with respect to different external determinants such as time and place. The third method, cross-textual variable analysis, compares the spelling variants of different versions of the same text, and is concerned with alterations from one version to the other in order to detect a pattern of deliberate changes. The advantages and disadvantages of the three methods are considered in the chapter, and their inherent theoretical premises are discussed. The author shows that data collection and interpretation are closely intertwined, and also that the chosen approach prestructures the data and leads to preferences for specific interpretations.

This chapter focuses on the historical path and the impact of digital finance policies on capital markets integration in the European Union. The first section gives an overview of the origins of key recent technological developments for the financial system, such as distributed ledger technologies, and the principle of regulatory intervention in the EU. The second section delves into the content of the most recent European strategy on digital finance, with a focus on recent regulatory interventions, such as the Markets in Crypto Assets Regulation (MiCAR) and the Distributed Ledger Technology Regulation (DLTR). The last section draws conclusions on the promises and perils of a digital security for capital markets integration and corporate governance.

In the wake of the European financial and sovereign debt crises, the euro area embarked in 2012 on creating a European Banking Union (EBU). A complete EBU, based on euro area leaders’ commitments, should include the Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM), the Single Resolution Mechanism (SRM), and the European Deposit Insurance Scheme (EDIS) to break the bank–sovereign vicious circle. This chapter aims to explain the agreement on the SSM and the SRM during the euro crisis, and the ongoing deadlock on the EDIS. In addition, it analyses the shift in national preferences towards a deposit reinsurance system. The negotiations on the SSM and the SRM were mainly characterized by Germany’s moral hazard concerns and calls for mutualization of risks by the southern countries. In EDIS, national preferences are also characterized by the interests of national deposit guarantee schemes favouring a reinsurance system, rather than a fully fledged EDIS with full mutualization of funds. In line with liberal intergovernmentalism, the preferences of Germany based on moral hazard concerns can partly account for the deadlock in the EDIS. The German government conditioned an agreement on a reinsurance system after a comprehensive list of risk-reduction measures including the most controversial limits on banks’ sovereign exposures.

The chapter surveys the literature on consumption risk sharing, focusing on the findings for the euro area and for the United States, but also presenting evidence for other countries. The literature examined found that risk sharing is higher in more mature federations, such as the United States, than in the euro area. The studies surveyed suggest that state/country-specific output shocks are primarily smoothed out through the capital and credit channel, whereas the fiscal channel as a minor role, especially in the euro area. Overall, about 70 per cent of shocks are smoothed in the United States while the figure is just 40 per cent in the euro area. At the same time, analysis of the response to the COVID-19 crisis indicates that risk sharing in the euro area has been more resilient than it was during the Global Financial Crisis of 2008–9. Overall, the results point to the need for further improvements to the private and public risk-sharing channels in the euro area to ensure more effective cushioning against asymmetric shocks and to boost progress towards the completion of European Monetary Union.

The creation of the Single Resolution Mechanism has dramatically changed the approach to dealing with failing large banks in eurozone countries. Within this new framework, the Single Resolution Board has assumed core decision-making powers with regard to (a) certain preventive measures, (b) the assessment of resolvability with corresponding powers to require banks to adopt changes with regard to, inter alia, funding arrangements, business activities, or even corporate structures, and (c) the initiation and calibration of resolution tools in relation to actual resolution cases. Significantly, as part of its preventive powers, the SRB is also responsible for the development of institution-specific ‘minimum requirements on own funds and eligible liabilities’, which seek to ensure that each institution holds a sufficient base of capital instruments and other instruments eligible for the allocation of losses to investors. Moreover, a Single Resolution Fund has been established, which is funded through mandatory contributions by credit institutions and designed to satisfy a broad range of funding needs in relation to resolution actions. Against that backdrop, this chapter critically assesses what has been accomplished so far in institutional, procedural, and substantive terms, and identifies major areas of concern for further reforms.

During the last decades, different concepts of reserve have been postulated to account for the brain’s capacity for resilience in the face of neurodegeneration. Lifelong bilingualism may be a reserve factor, delaying the onset of dementia by approximately four years. Nonetheless, the evidence remains inconsistent and the trajectory of the effects is not clear. For instance, it is unclear whether multilinguals have more cognitive benefits than bilinguals. This review aims to critically examine this question to delineate the major trends in the field. We first describe the overlap in the operationalization of reserve/resilience in order to provide a clear definition in support for such an approach in the field. We then review the bi-/multilingual literature to evaluate the current evidence for the question of whether bi-/multilingualism leads to increased reserve. Such considerations may lead to a re-evaluation of the construct in the bilingual literature and its implication in clinical studies.

This chapter is concerned with 3L1 acquisition (early trilingualism; i.e., the development of three languages during early childhood). This is a methodologically challenging and understudied topic, most typically focussing on children with two home languages that are both different from the language of the wider community. The available research on lexicon, syntax, and phonology shows that trilinguals can develop three languages at once in essentially the same way as monolingual and bilingual children do, with language-specific patterns in each of them. However, the languages interact and the additional language (compared to bilingual acquisition) complicates this interaction. I discuss whether and how early trilingualism and early bilingualism differ, and what the roles of language experience and typological distance are. More than any other setting, early trilingualism shows that children can acquire complex linguistic properties with substantially reduced exposure from a very young age. However, maintenance of all three languages is an issue, which mirrors findings on bilingual (heritage) speakers.

The advent of psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic methodologies has provided new insights into theories of language acquisition. Sequential multilingualism is no exception, and some of the most recent work on the subject has incorporated a particular focus on language processing. This chapter surveys some of the work on the processing of lexical and morphosyntactic aspects of third or further languages, with different offline and online methodologies. We also discuss how, while increasingly sophisticated techniques and experimental designs have improved our understanding of third language acquisition and processing, simpler but clever designs can answer pressing questions in our theoretical debate. We provide examples of both sophistication and clever simplicity in experimental design, and argue that the field would benefit from incorporating a combination of both concepts into future work.

We review studies that investigated pragmatic acquisition and processing in multilingual children and adults, and third language (L3) learners. Studies on pragmatic differentiation in simultaneous multilingual children show that they can differentially and appropriately use their languages in a context-sensitive manner from the age of two. The evidence on implicature reveals that multilinguals exhibit interpretation skills comparable to monolinguals; and that degree of multilingualism, measured continuously, has a positive effect. Research that examined speech acts from the perspective of crosslinguistic influence has provided some evidence (though mixed and unclear) that the L1 can affect L2 and L3 speech act performance. This influence can also occur from the L3 to the L1 and L2 in young children. Moreover, work on speech acts has shown that bilinguals, and especially balanced bilinguals, enjoy an advantage in learning the pragmatics of an additional language. We close the chapter by suggesting directions for future work.

In this chapter, we review studies of multilingual people with language impairments, specifically autism, dyslexia, and developmental language disorder in children, and aphasia and traumatic brain injury in adults. We address three topics that have emerged: disadvantages and advantages of being multilingual, the manifestation of impairments across different languages, and cross-language effects following intervention. Whereas the field of language impairment and bilingualism has seen a growth in the number of publications, only a few studies have focused specifically on multilingual people, and even fewer have compared multilingual to bilingual individuals. Methodological differences among the studies and the limited amount of data for each communication disorder impede our ability to draw consistent conclusions. Despite these limitations, we discuss common themes and point to future directions. Furthermore, we propose that the study of more than two languages can add to our understanding of key aspects of language impairment, representation, and processing.