The self-employed are among those facing the highest probability of strong income losses during the COVID-19 pandemic. Governments in many countries introduced support programs to support the self-employed, including the German federal government, which approved a €50bn emergency aid program at the end of March 2020 offering one-off lump-sum payments of up to €15,000 to those facing substantial revenue ...
2020| Joern Block, Alexander S. Kritikos, Maximilian Priem, Caroline Stiel
The EU Taxonomy is the first standardised and comprehensive classification system for sustainable economic activities. It covers activities responsible for up to 80 percent of EU greenhouse gas emissions and may play an important role in channelling investments into low-carbon technologies by helping investors to make informed decisions. However, especially in transition sectors much depends on the ...
We study the role of face-to-face interaction for gender differences in deceptive behavior and perceived honesty. In the first part, we compare women to men’s deceptive behavior using data from an incentivized income-reporting experiment with three treatments. Reporting is fully computerized in a baseline treatment but occurs face-to-face in the second and third treatment. Lies can be detected in the ...
This paper explores which climate-friendly projects could be part of the COVID-19 recovery while jump-starting the transition of the European basic materials industry. Findings from a literature review on technology options in advanced development stages for climate-friendly production and enhanced sorting and recycling of steel, cement, aluminium and plastics are combined with insights from interviews ...
2020| Olga Chiappinelli, Timo Gerres, Karsten Neuhoff, Frederik Lettow, Heleen de Coninck, Balázs Felsmann, Eugénie Joltreau, Gauri Khandekar, Pedro Linares, Jörn Richstein, Aleksander Śniegocki, Jan Stede, Tomas Wyns, Cornelis Zandt, Lars Zetterberg
This study examines the effect of a soft commitment device in the form of a savings goal calendar on savings for small business owners in Kampala, Uganda. We run a randomized controlled trial (RCT) under which the treatment group receives a calendar designed to set savings goals and to make a plan to reach this goal. The control group is given a plain calendar. We find no average effect on savings, ...
This study examines the effect of a soft commitment device in the form of a savings goal calendar on savings for small business owners in Kampala, Uganda. We run a randomized controlled trial (RCT) under which the treatment group receives a calendar designed to set savings goals and to make a plan to reach this goal. The control group is given a plain calendar. We find no average effect on savings, ...
We investigate patterns in common ownership networks between firms that are active in the US pharmaceutical industry for the period 2004-2014. Our main findings are that “brand firms” — i.e. firms that have R&D capabilities and launch new drugs — exhibit relatively dense common ownership networks with each other that further increase significantly in density over time, whereas the network of “generic ...
2020| Albert Banal-Estanol, Melissa Newham, Jo Seldeslachts
This study tests the prediction that perceived corruption reduces ethical behavior. Integrating a standard “cheating” experiment into a broad household survey in rural Thailand, we find clear support for this prediction: respondents who perceive corruption in state affairs are more likely to cheat and, thus, to fortify the negative consequences of corruption. Interestingly, there is a small group of ...
2020| Olaf Hübler, Melanie Koch, Lukas Menkhoff, Ulrich Schmidt
This paper applies a microeconomic-based stylized model to identify the optimal modal split of water supply infrastructure in regions of the Global South against the background of the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) No. 6. We assume a linear city, with some plausible assumptions on income and willingness-to-pay, and then calculate the optimal tap density, leading in turn to an optimal modal split ...
2020| Georg Meran, Markus Siehlow, Christian von Hirschhausen
We construct a novel database of monthly foreign exchange interventions for 49 countries over up to 22 years. We build on a text classification approach that extracts information about interventions from news articles and calibrate our procedure to data about actual interventions. Our new dataset allows us to document stylized facts about the use of foreign exchange interventions for countries that ...
About two billion people in the world do not own a financial account and there are many more who use financial services only occasionally. In the past, initiatives which address these problems of financial exclusion focused on the supply side of financial markets, in particular by increasing the branch network of banks and by offering cheap bank products. While this had the desired effect, recent ...
We propose a new bootstrap for inference for impulse responses in structural vector autoregressive models identified with an external proxy variable. Simulations show that the new bootstrap provides confidence intervals for impulse responses which often have more precise coverage than and similar length as the competing moving-block bootstrap intervals. An empirical example shows how the new bootstrap ...
We study the role of financial literacy for inter-temporal decision-making using an adapted version of the Convex Time Budget Protocol (Andreoni and Sprenger 2012). While we find no evidence of dynamically inconsistent preferences in the aggregate, we document substantial heterogeneity in choice-patterns and estimated parameters at the individual-level: We find that subjects with higher levels of financial ...
Human decision-making differs due to variation in both incentives and available information. This generates substantial challenges for the evaluation of whether and how machine learning predictions can improve decision outcomes. We propose a framework that incorporates machine learning on large-scale administrative data into a choice model featuring heterogeneity in decision maker payoff functions ...
A range of studies has analysed how climate-related risks can impact financial markets, focusing on equity and corporate bond holdings. This article takes a closer look at transition risks and opportunities in residential mortgages. Mortgage loans are important from a financial perspective due to their large share in banks’ assets and their long credit lifetime, and from a climate perspective due to ...
There is substantial evidence on the effectiveness of short-time work on reducing unemployment. However, no study looks at its role during natural disasters. This article exploits the exogenous nature of the 2013 European floods to assess if the impact depends on the quality of the short-time work mechanism across affected counties. We use regression discontinuity designs to show that unemployment ...
During both the 2008 and the COVID crises, aggregate employment in Europe and the US fell despite continuing growth in the aggregate capital stock. Using more than one million firm-year observations of small and medium European firms between 2003 and 2018, this paper introduces new stylized facts on how firms’ relative demand for labor and capital evolved as their capital structure adjusted to the ...
Modern OCA theory has developed different conclusions on when forming a currency union is beneficial. An important pragmatic question in this context is: Did delegating monetary policy to the ECB increase stress in the individual euro area countries? An SVAR analysis reveals that monetary stress has declined more in the euro area than in the euro areas’ doppelganger. The synthetic doppelganger is composed ...
2020| Jan Philipp Fritsche, Patrick Christian Harms
We disentangle the effects of monetary policy announcements on real economic variables into an interest rate shock component and a central bank information shock component. We identify both components using changes in interest rate futures and in exchange rates around monetary policy announcements. While the volatility of interest rate surprises declines around the Great Recession, the volatility of ...
2020| Oliver Holtemöller, Alexander Kriwoluzky, Boreum Kwak
A major challenge for proxy vector autoregressive analysis is the construction of a suitable instrument variable for identifying a shock of interest. We propose a simple proxy that can be constructed whenever the dating and sign of particular shocks are known. It is shown that the proxy can lead to impulse response estimates of the impact effects of the shock of interest that are nearly as efficient ...