By Dominik Meyland and Dorothea Schäfer The current banking regulatory framework assigns EU government bonds a risk weight of zero. Since the European debt crisis, there has been increasing controversy over eliminating this equity capital privilege, which is viewed as contributing to the close relationship between state and bank risks. This report analyses the development of home bias—the ...
Understanding the distributional impacts of market-based climate policies is crucial to design economically efficient climate change mitigation policies that are socially acceptable and avoid adverse impacts on the poor. Empirical studies that examine the distributional impacts of carbon pricing and fossil fuel subsidy reforms in different countries arrive at ambiguous results. To systematically determine ...
Understanding whether laws shape or simply reflect citizens' attitudes is important but empirically difficult. We provide new evidence on this question by studying the relationship between legal same-sex relationship recognition policies (SSRRPs) and attitudes toward sexual minorities in Europe. Using data from the European Social Surveys covering 2002-2016 and exploiting variation in the timing of ...
This study estimates mean and distributional effects of early between-school ability tracking on student achievement. For identification, I exploit heterogeneity in tracking regimes between German federal states. After comprehensive primary school, about 40% of students are selected for the academic track and taught in separate schools in all states. The remaining students, however, are either taught ...
Are there economies of scale to data in internet search? This paper is first to use real search engine query logs to empirically investigate how data drives the quality of internet search results. We find evidence that the quality of search results improve with more data on previous searches. Moreover, our results indicate that the type of data matters as well: personalized information is particularly ...
Unlike most retrospective merger studies that only focus on price effects, we also estimate the impact of a merger on product variety. We use an original dataset on Dutch supermarkets to assess the effect of a merger that was conditionally approved by the Dutch Competition Authority (ACM) on prices and the depth of assortment. We find that the merger did not affect prices but it led the merging parties ...
We study the role of global media during the Greek debt crisis and relate it to the transmission of events on financial actors' expectations. To identify news coverage about the Greek debt crisis, we apply topic modeling to a newly compiled dataset of over 430,000 articles from The International New York Times and Financial Times from 2009 to 2015. We identify a Greek debt crisis topic and relate it ...
A regime shift towards increased in inflation expectations is credited with jumpstarting the recovery from the Great Depression in the United States. Germany experienced a recovery as fast and strong in the 1930s. What role did inflation expectations play at the start of this remarkable economic upturn? To answer this question, we study inflation expectations in Germany across two different methods: ...
