Publikationen Prognose und Konjunkturpolitik

Crimea and Punishment: The Impact of Sanctions on Russian Economy and Economies of the Euro Area

The conflict between Russia and Ukraine that started in March 2014 led Western countries and Russia to impose economic sanctions on each other, including the euro zone members. The paper investigates the impact of the sanctions on the real side of the economies of Russia and the euro area. The effects of sanctions are analyzed with a structural vector autoregression. To pin down the effect we are interested ...

Bootstrapping Impulse Responses of Structural Vector Autoregressive Models Identified through GARCH

Different bootstrap methods and estimation techniques for inference for structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) models identified by generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (GARCH) are reviewed and compared in a Monte Carlo study. The bootstrap methods considered are a wild bootstrap, a moving blocks bootstrap and a GARCH residual based bootstrap. Estimation is done by Gaussian maximum ...

US Monetary Policy and the Euro Area

This study documents empirically that contractionary US monetary policy may generate short-term expansionary spillover effects. In individual Euro Area (EA) member countries, economic activity increases, mainly via the trade channel. Also, domestic credit and stock markets expand, highlighting the importance of the financial channel. However, the international repercussions are transitory and distributed ...

Leading Indicators of Fiscal Distress: Evidence from Extreme Bonds Analysis

Early warning systems (EWSs) are widely used to assess a country’s vulnerability to fiscal distress. A fiscal distress episode is identified as a period when government experiences extreme funding difficulties. Most EWSs employ a specific set of only fiscal leading indicators predetermined by the researchers, which casts doubt on their robustness. We revisit this issue using extreme bounds analysis, ...

Big Banks and Macroeconomic Outcomes: Theory and Cross‐Country Evidence of Granularity

Does the mere presence of big banks affect macroeconomic outcomes? We develop a theory of granularity for the banking sector by modeling heterogeneous banks charging variable markups. Using data for a large set of countries, we show that the banking sector is indeed “granular,” as the right tail of the bank size distribution follows a power law. We demonstrate empirically that the presence of big banks, ...

R&D Investments and Corporate Cash Holdings

This paper presents evidence about how research and development (R&D) expenditures affect corporate cash holdings in European country groups that differ in their innovation capacity. In theory, one can expect intangible investments such as R&D to result in higher cash stocks than fixed investments, particularly because intangible capital is less suitable as collateral for obtaining external funds. ...

Choosing between Different Time-Varying Volatility Models für Structural Vector Autoregressive Analysis

The performance of information criteria and tests for residual heteroscedasticity for choosing between different models for time‐varying volatility in the context of structural vector autoregressive analysis is investigated. Although it can be difficult to find the true volatility model with the selection criteria, using them is recommended because they can reduce the mean squared error of impulse ...

Speculative Price Bubbles in Urban Housing Markets: Empirical Evidence from Germany

In the light of the unconventional monetary policies implemented by most large central banks around the world, there is an intense debate about the potential impact on the prices of capital assets. Particularly in Germany, skepticism about the sustainability of the current policy by the European Central Bank is wide spread and concerns about the emergence of a speculative price bubble in the housing ...

Ohne Plan: Wirtschaftsentwicklung und Wirtschaftspolitik in Ungarn

The State Dependent Impact of Bank Exposure on Sovereign Risk

The theoretical literature remains inconclusive on whether changes in bank exposure to the domestic sovereign have an adverse effect on the sovereign risk position through a diabolic loop in the sovereign-bank nexus, or reduce perceived default risk by acting as a disciplinary device for the sovereign. In this paper we empirically analyze the impact of exogenous changes in bank exposure on the risk ...