Publikationen der Abteilung Makroökonomie

Euro Area Inflation Differentials: The Role of Fiscal Policies Revisited

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 ...

Navigating the Housing Channel of Monetary Policy across Euro Area Regions

This paper assesses the role of the housing market in the transmission of monetary policy across euro area regions. By exploiting a novel regional dataset on housing-related variables, a structural panel VAR analysis shows that conventional and unconventional monetary policy shocks propagate effectively to the economy, particularly to the housing sector, albeit in a heterogeneous fashion across regions. ...

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 ...

A HANK2 Model of Monetary Unions

How does a monetary union alter the impact of business cycle shocks at the household level? We develop a Heterogeneous Agent New Keynesian model of two countries (HANK) and show in closed form that a monetary union shifts the adjustment to a shock horizontally across countries, within the brackets of the union-wide wealth distribution, rather than vertically, that is, across the brackets of the union-wide ...

Is Interest Rate Hiking a Recipe for Missing Several Goals of Monetary Policy—Beating Inflation, Preserving Financial Stability, and Keeping up Output Growth?

levelsof all goods in the US and Europe rose surprisingly quickly and persistently. TheFED began in March 2022 and the ECB in July 2022 with historically unique interestrate increases to combat the wage-price spiral that had not yet begun. In this article weshow that energy, commodities and food were the main drivers of inflation. For this reason,central banks’ goal of weakening demand for labor through ...