Principles of financial ethics and institutional design for sovereign debt policies conducive to European integration

We interviewed Professor Thomas and Dr Prinz to find out why they had decided to work on sovereign debt policies, and to learn more about their joint project and the outcomes. Both Thomas and Prinz felt that while the topic of money, finance, and debt has been one of the central challenges for Europe in the past fifteen years, the research had been mostly limited to very specialist sub fields in finance and banking and other applied fields. They wanted to find out whether there were any philosophical or theoretical perspectives and principles that could be created for sovereign [government] debt policies.

Their vision was to create a forum which brought together scholars with a philosophical interest in debt, not just from philosophy but also from the fields of political economy, law, and practitioners based in central banks and supervisory boards. This meant the project team would be able to gain access to primary material through their colleagues on the forum,  as well as creating a catalyst to help early career researchers connect with an international community of practitioners and scholars with whom they could exchange ideas and share their work in progress.  

This resulted in the project team forming the Ethics of Debt Network, which provided a space for high quality discussion on work on debt, money and finance with a philosophical dimension.  To date the network has hosted 4 workshops, three online and one in person, from across Europe, America and Australia, reaching an audience of 50 at its peak. During the online meetings the team also successfully experimented with a new tool, PollEverywhere, which helps meeting hosts run online polls, quizzes and general participant engagement, and they found this created a more equal and focused discussion than an in-person meeting might. 

Although Covid had an impact on the project and the team’s plans, Thomas and Prinz found a lot of positives too, such as being able to meet more frequently virtually, and being able to include participants from across Europe in meetings.  They also found the pre-reading of papers worked better for online meetings, and allowing everyone to have live access to the documents as they were at their computers during the meeting, resulted in a higher level of engagement and collaboration.

Feedback from attendees at the workshops has been really positive and helped to bring together early career scholars to discuss their work in progress, and helped more senior scholars become good mentors to these early career researchers, which will have improved their personal PhD trajectories.

Since starting the Network Thomas and Prinz have noticed similar initiatives have started in other areas, including a German network, which focuses on  empirical approaches to debt, and Dr Prinz  is now in talks with the German network organisers to see if the two networks can be merged to create a bigger collaboration of researchers and practitioners and help ensure its longevity.

As well as the Forum, Professor Thomas and Dr Prinz hope to continue their collaboration and have applied for a large research grant, the outcome of which is still being awaited.

Of the collaboration itself, Dr Prinz stated “it’s been great to work with Alan who has a lot of experience and being able to draw upon the breadth of research expertise that I don’t have.  Marco had a lot of contacts in the field of finance and it’s been useful to be able to tap into these resources.  I brought enthusiasm and gave a lot of time to the project, all these things together is what made it work.”