The project examines the extent to which bank lending has changed since the financial crisis and which factors play a role. One focus of the analysis is the impact of unconventional monetary policy on lending behavior and profitability in the banking sector.
Top income inequality rose sharply in the United States over the last 40 years but increased only slightly in economies like France and Japan. Why? This paper explores a model in which heterogeneous entrepreneurs, broadly interpreted, exert effort to generate exponential growth in their incomes. On its own, this force leads to rising inequality. Creative destruction by outside innovators restrains...
The form of forward guidance matters for its effectiveness in anchoring expectations about the future path of policy rates. We report cross-country evidence about the impact of different types of forward guidance on the reactiveness of markets to macroeconomic news and on disagreement across forecasters, and show that timecontingent forward guidance over a short horizon and open-ended forward...
We investigate the role played by the media in the expectations formation process of households. Using a novel news-topic-based approach we show that the news types the media choose to report on are good predictors of households' stated ination expectations. In turn, in a noisy information model setting, augmented with a simple media channel, we show that the underlying time series properties of...
We assess the empirical validity of the trilemma (or impossible trinity) in the 2000s for a large sample of advanced and emerging economies. To do so, we estimate Taylor-rule type monetary policy reaction functions, relating the local policy rate to real-time forecasts of domestic fundamentals, global variables, as well as the base-country policy rate. In the regressions, we explore variations in...
Power generation from lignite and hard coal was responsible for more than a quarter of German greenhouse gas emissions in 2016. Of all federal states, North Rhine-Westphalia is by far the largest carbon emitter. The Growth, Structural Change and Regional Development Commission (also known as “Coal Commission”) among others are currently debating alternative pathways toward a coal phaseout ...
Personality is a powerful predictor of central life outcomes, including subjective well-being. Yet, we still know little about how personality manifests in the very last years of life when well-being typically falls rapidly. Here, we investigate whether the Big Five personality traits buffer (or magnify) terminal decline in well-being beyond and in interaction with functioning in key physical and social ...
This article analyses how the presence of a dominant group of voters within the electorate affects voter turnout. Theoretically, we argue that its absolute size affects turnout via increased free-riding incentives and reduced social pressure to vote within a larger dominant group. Its relative size compared to other groups within the electorate influences turnout through instrumental and expressive ...
After a major conference on the report of the High Level Expert Group on Sustainable Finance in Berlin, organized by DIW Berlin together with the European Commission and the "Hub for Sustainable Finance" on 22.2 in Berlin, we sat down with a few interested colleagues from various institutions in the field of sustainable finance and decided that it would be a good idea to have a "place" to discuss...
