Quo Vadis? Identity, Policy and the Future of the European Union

Thorsten Beck

Professor of Banking and Finance

Cass Business School

Thorsten Beck is Professor of Banking and Finance at Cass Business School. Prior to that, he was Professor of Economics at Tilburg University in the Netherlands and was the founding chair of the European Banking Centre from 2008 to 2013. He is also a CEPR Research Fellow in its Financial Economics programme. Previously he worked in the research department of the World Bank and has also worked as consultant for – among others - the IMF, the European Commission and the German Development Corporation. His research, academic publications and operational work have focused on two major questions: What is the relationship between finance and economic development? And What policies are needed to build a sound and effective financial system? Recently, he has concentrated on access to financial services, including SME finance, as well as on the design of regulatory and bank resolution frameworks.

In addition to numerous academic publications in leading economics and finance journals, he has co-authored several policy reports on access to finance, financial systems in Africa and cross-border banking. He holds a PhD from the University of Virginia and an MA from the University of Tübingen in Germany.

Dennis Novy

Associate Professor of Economics

University of Warwick

Dennis Novy is Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Warwick. He is also a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) and an Associate at the Centre for Economic Performance (CEP) at the London School of Economics. He received a PhD from the University of Cambridge and works in the fields of international trade, international economics and macroeconomics. Dennis has been a recent visitor at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and the University of California, Davis. Dennis was the Specialist Adviser to the House of Lords for their inquiry into the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).

Geoffrey Underhill

Professor

University of Amsterdam

Geoffrey Underhill was born in Vancouver, Canada (1959), and completed his BA (Hons) in Political Studies at Queen's University at Kingston, graduating in 1980 with First Class honours. His main interests in political science were comparative/international political economy and international relations. In the course of his undergraduate studies he also completed the Certificat d'Etudes Politiques at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris, specialising in the French political system and international relations/political economy. He received his PhD in 1987 at St. Antony's College, University of Oxford. Underhill then taught at the University of Stirling (Scotland), and for three years at McMaster University in Canada, before moving to the University of Warwick in the UK in 1991. He took up the Chair of International Governance at the Universiteit van Amsterdam in October 1998. From May 2003-August 2006 he was appointed as Director of the Amsterdams Instituut voor Maatschappijwetenschap (AIM), now split into the faculty's Graduate School for Social Sciences (GSSS) and undergraduate College Sociale Wetenschappen (CSW). As of September 2006, Underhill returned to his professorship, teaching for the CSW/GSSS and carrying out his research activities as a member of the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research, an interdisciplinary institute based at the UvA and accredited by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences.

Barbara Casu

Professor of Banking and Finance; and Director, Centre for Banking Research

Cass Business School

Barbara Casu is the Director of the Centre for Banking Research at Cass Business School, City University of London, UK, where she is Professor of Banking and Finance. Her main research interest is empirical banking, although several of Barbara's research projects are cross-disciplinary and include aspects of financial regulation, structured finance, accounting and corporate governance. She is co-author of the book Introduction to Banking (FT Pearson Education).