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Austrians remain avid savers, but they often park their money in low-yield savings accounts where the real interest rate is often zero or negative.

Employing digital technologies to make the European financial sector more efficient, robust, and sustainable – this is the goal of the EU-funded MSCA Digital Finance research program. WU Vienna University of Economics and Business is on board as one of the partners.

Politicians, regulators, and pundits have criticized banks' financial reporting as a key culprit of the problem in the financial crisis 2008–2009 and have called for changes. But is the criticism really justified? What changes are necessary? In a recent study, Professor Christian Laux from the Institute for Finance, Banking and Insurance at WU (Vienna University of Economics and Business) and his co-authors examine the disclosure and recognition of losses of international banks during the financial crisis. The authors also investigate the consequences of a regulation that reduces the impact of losses on banks’ required regulatory capital. The evidence is important to guide standard setting and recent debates in bank regulation.

The annual report is one of the most important publications of any publicly listed company. However, only very little is known about the readers of annual reports and the things they are interested in.

What role do optimistic and pessimistic expectations play in the financial markets? And how do these sentiments affect banks’ lending decisions? This question is at the heart of a recent study by Professor Ingrid Kubin, head of the Institute for International Economics and Development at WU (Vienna University of Economics), and her co-authors.

Central banks and financial regulators are increasingly aware that climate change poses a major threat to economic and financial stability. Investors and financial markets are also subject to climate-related risks. This means that climate change will have long-term effects on everyone’s prosperity: This is the conclusion reached by Senior Assistant Professor Irene Monasterol from WU’s Institute for Ecological Economics.

Energy market researchers from WU (Vienna University of Economics and Business), FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, and UAS Grisons have crunched the numbers to find out which strategies are most efficient at reducing CO2 emissions. According to their study, much greater reductions in CO2 emissions can be achieved by increasing the prices of carbon certificates than by subsidizing wind and solar power. The research has been published in the “Journal of Environmental Economics and Management,” one of the leading journals in the field of environmental economics.