Melanie Koch, Research Associate in the International Economics Department and GC Class of 2015, has successfully defended her dissertation at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. The dissertation with the title "Non-Standard Preferences and Beliefs in Financial Decision Making" was supervised by Prof. Dr. Lukas Menkhoff (DIW Berlin) and Prof. Dr. Georg Weizsäcker (HU). We ...
This paper studies costly political resistance in a non-democracy. When Nazi Germany surrendered in May 1945, 40% of the designated Soviet occupation zone was initially captured by the western Allied Expeditionary Force. This occupation was short-lived: Soviet forces took over after less than two months and installed an authoritarian regime in what became the German Democratic Republic (GDR). We exploit ...
IT and Research Infrastructure Department Research Projects
This paper investigates the effect of reforms of insolvency regulations on cross-border debt and equity investments at a sectoral level. Using disaggregated data from the Securities Holdings Statistics by Sector (SHSS) and OECD-indicators on the efficiency of insolvency regulations, we find that investors prefer to invest more in countries with more efficient insolvency frameworks. The effect, however, ...
Abstract: User generated content is increasingly substituting content created by professionals. Local news that is generated by citizen journalists could be a promising way of supporting the struggling newspaper industry by reducing costs for professional journalists. We study a network of 122 local Austrian newspapers operating a hybrid model of citizen and professional journalism. We first...
Abstract: We study competition between Airbnb and hotel accommodations in Paris in 2017 to assess the welfare implications of Airbnb’s presence on hotels and travelers. The existing literature on the subject exclusively uses across city variation in Airbnb diffusion. Consequently, it does not take into account that the location of an accommodation within a city might be an important...
The European sovereign debt crisis illustrated how the stability of the entire financial system suffers when banks and sovereigns become too intertwined. However, there has been seemingly little success in reducing the bank-sovereign nexus in the decade since the crisis. As this Weekly Report shows, home bias remains strong and many European banks are still primarily purchasing domestic government ...
We construct a news-based viral disease index and study the dynamic impact of epidemics on the world economy, using structural vector autoregressions. Epidemic shocks have persistently negative effects, both directly and indirectly, on affected countries and on world output. The shocks lead to a significant fall in global trade, employment, and consumer prices for three quarters, and the losses are ...
