The LOEWE Center SAFE at Goethe University Frankfurt’s House of Finance will continue to be supported by the State of Hessen. This was announced today by the Hessen State Ministry of Higher Education, Research and the Arts. The Research Center SAFE – “Sustainable Architecture for Finance in Europe” – is dedicated to the analysis of European financial markets and their regulation and has been funded by the Hessian research excellence initiative LOEWE since 2013. The Ministry now announced that it will provide SAFE with 5 Mio. Euro for 2016 and with the prospect of further 10 Mio Euro for 2017 and 2018. This was decided by the LOEWE Administrative Commission based on the votes of external referees and the funding recommendations by the LOEWE Program Council.
“SAFE serves the objective to design financial markets more sustainably, i.e. to regulate their excesses in the interest of society: a central task of politics which is, in this context, being stimulated by academia. It is good that this important research can be continued,” Birgitta Wolff, President of Goethe University, said.
“We are very happy that the work we achieved in the last three years convinced the academic referees and the State Government,” Jan Pieter Krahnen, Academic Director of SAFE, said. “The positive mid-term evaluation encourages us to proceed with great commitment in our projects in the areas of research and policy advice and to lay the foundations for a continuation of SAFE beyond the LOEWE funding.”
Interdisciplinary research group focuses on crisis analysis and future topics
SAFE aims to explore the requirements for an optimal economic and legal framework for European financial markets and their actors. In order to capture the complexity of markets and their interplay with industry, politics and central banks in all crucial aspects, the LOEWE Center SAFE builds on the cross-area collaboration of more than 30 professors, 26 postdoctoral researchers, 40 research assistants as well as a network of about 70 researchers from academic institutions worldwide from the areas of finance, micro- and macroeconomics, law, marketing, sociology and financial mathematics.
Important topics covered are the stability and regulation of financial institutions, saving, consumption and investment decisions of private households, trading and asset pricing on financial markets as well as monetary policy and the stability of public households. Besides fundamental research, SAFE scholars are devoted to topical questions such as the implementation of the European banking and capital markets union, the regulation of shadow banking or the limitation of systemic risks. Also, future topics like demographical change, old-age provision and the overcoming of social imbalances are being tackled. In the first three years, SAFE researchers have already been successful in publishing a large number of research results in high-ranking international academic journals.
Policy Center maintains dialogue with politicians, central bankers and regulatory authorities
On top of its research activities it is a key concern of SAFE to contribute to sustainable, stability- and growth-oriented politics by offering professional policy recommendations based on state-of-the-art research. The SAFE Policy Center maintains a continuous dialogue with high-ranking policy makers and representatives from central banks and regulatory authorities in Brussels, Berlin and Wiesbaden/Frankfurt. By offering a variety of attractive events it also raises public awareness for topical questions in the area of financial market regulation. It is a key objective of SAFE to overcome the common separation of academia and the political realm in Germany in the area of finance without giving up its neutral role as an academic institution.
