Publikationen Prognose und Konjunkturpolitik

Vor dem Brexitus: Folgen des britischen EU-Referendums für Ostmitteleuropa

Die britische Regierung will im Jahr 2017 den Austritt aus der EU erklären. Dies wird Folgen für die EU-Staaten Ostmittel- und Südosteuropas haben. Die Abwertung des Pfunds nach dem britischen Referendum hat bereits den Wert der Überweisungen von Arbeitsmigranten verringert. Erheblich wären die Folgen, sollte Großbritannien die Arbeitnehmerfreizügigkeit einschränken. Auch auf den Handel und in geringerem ...

Housing Market Fundamentals, Housing Quality and Energy Consumption: Evidence from Germany

This study investigates the relationship between regional housing market fundamentals and energy consumption. We argue that dwellings, in particularly rental properties, are not only consumer goods, but also constitute financial market assets. Properties are spatially fixed and traded in regional contexts, where real estate market characteristics like vacancy, income levels, and expectations determine ...

Personal Income Tax Progressivity and Output Volatility: Evidence from OECD Countries

This paper investigates empirically the effect of personal income tax progressivity on output volatility using macro data from a sample of OECD countries over the period 1982–2009. Our measure of progressivity is based on the difference between the marginal and the average personal income tax rate for the average production worker. We find supportive empirical evidence for the hypothesis that higher ...

Fiscal Policy Rules, Budget Deficits, and Forecasting Biases

In this paper, we analyze the impact fiscal policy rules have on budget deficits and forecasting biases in official budget outlooks. Persistent budget deficits and over-optimistic budget forecasts have been observed in many countries in the past, especially in the euro area. To prevent such developments from happening in the future, fiscal rules have been revised or implemented with the aim to strengthen ...

Between the Hammer and the Anvil: The Impact of Economic Sanctions and Oil Prices on Russia's Ruble

Credit Provision and Banking Stability after the Great Financial Crisis: The Role of Bank Regulation and the Quality of Governance

In response to the Great Financial Crisis (GFC), bank regulatory regimes were tightened world-wide to strengthen banking stability and the resilience of the banking sectors. Yet, it is often claimed that regulatory tightening may lead banks to cut back on lending and comes at the cost of a lower loan supply. The present paper uses a country panel for 50 advanced and emerging market economies to analyze ...

Sovereign Risk, Interbank Freezes, and Aggregate Fluctuations

This paper shows how spillovers from sovereign risk to banks׳ access to wholesale funding establish a bank-sovereign nexus. In a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium set-up, heterogeneous banks give rise to an interbank market where government bonds are used as collateral. Government borrowing under limited commitment is costly ex ante as bank funding conditions tighten when the quality of collateral ...

Too Much of a Good Thing? A Theory of Short-Term Debt as a Sorting Device

This paper shows that the liquidity risk associated with short-term debt financing can be used to sort insolvent firms out of financial markets when their solvency risk is private information. Notwithstanding this sorting role of short-term debt, unregulated financial firms tend to choose an inefficiently short debt maturity structure. This inefficiency arises for two reasons. First, by issuing more ...

Urban House Prices: A Tale of 48 Cities

In this paper, the authors construct a unique data set of Internet offer prices for flats in 48 large European cities across 24 countries. The data collected between January and May 2012 from 33 websites, are drawn from Internet advertisements of dwellings. Using the resulting sample of more than 1,000,000 announcements, the authors compute the quality-adjusted city-specific house prices. Based on ...

Gesamtwirtschaftlich unbedeutend: Ostmitteleuropa und die EU-Sanktionen gegen Russland