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Insolvency Regimes and Cross-Border Investment Decisions

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, ...

Local News, UGC and Professionals: Evidence from Citizen Journalism

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...

COVID-19 Economic Crisis: Europe Needs More than One Instrument

Modeling Geographical Preferences to Study the Welfare Implication of Airbnb's Presence in the Short-Term Accomodation Market

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...

Government Bonds: European Banks Still Display Strong Home Bias: Requiring Capital Backing Could Worsen Problem

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 ...

Viral Shocks to the World Economy

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 ...

Joint Economic Forecast: Economy in Shock – Fiscal Policy to Counteract

The coronavirus pandemic is triggering a severe recession in Germany. Economic output will shrink by 4.2 percent this year. This is what the leading economics research institutes expect in their spring report. For next year, they are forecasting a recovery and growth of 5.8 percent. Gross domestic product is likely to have shrunk by 1.9 percent in the first quarter of 2020 alone. In the second quarter, ...

Currency Futures' Risk Premia and Risk Factors

The use of futures exchange contracts instead of forwards completes the maturity spectrum of the correlation between the spot yield and the premium. We find that the forward premium puzzle (FFP) depends significantly on the maturity horizon of the futures contract and the choice of sampling period. The FFP appears to be a pre-crisis phenomenon and is only observed for maturities longer than about one ...

Real Incomes Increasing, Low-Income Rate Decreasing in Individual Age Groups

The number of employed persons in Germany has grown by over five million since 2000, in part due to an increase in immigration. This development is reflected in private household income, which has increased by 12 percent over the same period. Since 2013, all income groups have been benefiting from this increase and in 2015, the lowest income decile began benefiting as well. Disposable income inequality ...

Virtual Conference: German Sustainable Finance Strategy in a European Context

Co-organized by the Sustainable Finance Research Platform (SFRP) and Berlin Seminar on Energy and Climate Policy (BSEC) Sustainable Finance is not only a key element of the climate policy agenda. In times of crisis, like the one we are currently experiencing, sustainable finance can also make substantial contributions to making our financial system more resilient, more sustainable and more...