JUMPS is an international economics open network aimed at studying the effectiveness of the current policy design to jump start Europe after the pandemic shock.

During the last two decades, the world economy has experienced two major shocks of unprecedented magnitude, the 2007-08 financial crisis and the COVID pandemic episode. Whereas the financial crisis was rooted into endogenous distortions hidden in the financial sector, the COVID shock had a completely exogenous nature. Shocks of such a magnitude require significant policy interventions to avoid that they end up into economic depressions. The EU has reacted in an unprecedented way to the COVID shock through a combination of expansionary monetary and fiscal policies. This policy mix is new and different from that used in the aftermath of the financial crisis which was mainly relying on monetary policy. The ECB activated the Pandemic Emergency Purchasing Program (PEPP); the EU Council and the EU Commission suspended the Stability Pact, eased the possibility of state aids (see the various versions of the Temporary Framework), approved various initiatives at the euro-area level (e.g., SURE), and launched a new program, Next Generation EU (NGEU), to sustain investment and the recovery.

JUMPS explores the effectiveness of the current monetary and fiscal policy mix, its potential trade-offs and risks, and distributional issues and political economy considerations that can affect its implementation.

The idea of JUMPS was born from the funding of the MUR for a research project proposed by a group of economists from various Italian universities. It involves the Department of Economics and Law (Sapienza University of Rome), Department of Economics and Finance (Luiss, Rome), Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche, Aziendali e Statistiche (University of Palermo), Department of Economics and Management (University of Pavia), Department of Economics, Social Studies, Applied Mathematics and Statistics (University of Turin).

Collegio Carlo Alberto (Turin) and School of European Political economy (Rome) are partners of the project.