Publikationen der Abteilung Makroökonomie

Stock Market Participation, Work from Home, and Inequality

Stock market participation among working household heads jumped upwards in 2020 - in Germany by about 25 %. A major cause is the required use of work from home (WfH). We show this by adding WfH to a large set of explanatory variables. Moreover, we implement an instrumental variables estimation based on industry-specific levels of WfH-capacity. The transmission channels seem to work via increased available ...

Euro Area Inflation Differentials: The Role of Fiscal Policies Revisited

The Non-linear Impact of Risk Tolerance on Entrepreneurial Profit and Business Survival

Entrepreneurs tend to be risk tolerant but is higher risk tolerance always better? In a sample of about 2100 small businesses, we find an inverted U-shaped relation between risk tolerance and profitability. This relationship holds in a simple bilateral regression, and even after controlling for a large set of individual and business characteristics. Apparently, one major transmission goes from risk ...

Sovereign vs. Corporate Debt and Default: More Similar than You Think

Theory suggests that corporate and sovereign bonds are fundamentally different, also because sovereign debt has no bankruptcy mechanism and is hard to enforce. We show empirically that the two assets are more similar than you think, at least when it comes to high-yield bonds over the past 20 years. We use rich new data to compare high-yield US corporate (“junk”) bonds to high-yield emerging market ...

Monetary Policy and Mispricing in Stock Markets

We investigate the role of monetary policy in stock price misalignments and explore whether central banks can attenuate excessive mispricing as suggested by the proponents of a “leaning against the wind” monetary policy. Decomposing stock prices into expected excess dividends, an equity risk premium, and a mispricing component, we find that prices fall more strongly in response to an increase in the ...

Foreign Debt, Capital Controls, and Secondary Markets: Theory and Evidence from Nazi Germany

We investigate how internal distribution motives can affect the implementation of an important macroeconomic policy: capital controls. To do this, we study one of history’s largest debt repatriations, which took place under strict capital controls in 1930s Germany, providing a wealth of quantitative and historical evidence. We show that the authorities kept private repatriations under strict control, ...

The Rise and Fall of Social Housing? Housing Decommodification in Long-run Comparison

The comparative study of housing decommodification lags behind classical welfare state research, while housing research itself is rich in homeownership studies but lacks comparative accounts of private and social rentals due to missing comparative data. Building on existing works and various primary sources, this study presents a new collection of up to forty-eight countries’ social housing shares ...

Forward to the Past: Short-Term Effects of the Rent Freeze in Berlin

In 2020, Berlin introduced a rigorous rent-control policy responding to soaring prices by capping rents: the Mietendeckel (rent freeze). The German Constitutional Court revoked the policy only one year later. Although successful in lowering rents during its duration, the consequences for Berlin’s rental market and close-by markets are per se not clear. This article evaluates the short-term causal supply-side ...

Crowding of International Mutual Funds

We study the relationship between crowding and performance in the active mutual fund industry. Using the equity holdings overlap of 17,364 global funds, we find that funds that crowd into the same stocks underperform passive benchmark funds by 1.4% per year. The negative returns to crowding can at least in part be explained by excess demand for liquidity and the associated discount for holding liquid ...

What is the Difference between Fossil Fuel Embargo and Price Shocks?

In this paper, we model a fossil fuel embargo as a temporary quantity constraint on fossil fuel imports and wecompare the impact with the effect of a fossil fuel price shock. We show that while both shocks have similar responses of output and inflation, they differ with respect to the reaction of other macroeconomic components,such as consumption, exports and the trade balance. In particular, an embargo ...