This dissertation consists of four essays that investigate the economic consequences of frictions in credit markets and the implications for macroprudential and monetary policies. The first essay addresses the following question: How do excessive debt holdings on borrower balance sheets impede economic activity? To address this question, we estimate a non-linear panel threshold model on a large-scale ...
Der Beginn der globalen Finanzkrise und die Implementierung einer außerordentlich expansiven Geldpolitik in vielen Volkswirtschaften lösten ein erneutes Interesse an den Auswirkungen globaler und ausländischer Schocks in einzelnen Ländern aus. Zugleich hat die länderübergreifende Heterogenität der makroökonomischen und finanziellen Auswirkungen von Schocks die Notwendigkeit unterstrichen, jene Faktoren, ...
We employ a psychometrically validated performance test to study economic competence among representative sample of 1,687 early secondary school students in Southwest Germany. The rich dataset allows us to study variation in economic competence across school types and observable student characteristics. Our results show that economic competence is significantly lower among female students, migrants, ...
Industrial demand response can play an important part in balancing the intermittent production from a growing share of renewable energies in electricity markets. This paper analyses the role of aggregators – intermediaries between participants and power markets – in facilitating industrial demand response. Based on the results from semi-structured interviews with German demand response aggregators, ...
An increasing body of empirical evidence is documenting trends toward rising concentration, profits, and markups in many industries around the world since the 1980s. Two major criticisms of these studies is that concentration and market shares are poorly measured at the national industry level while firm level revenues are a poor indicator of product sales. We use a novel database that identifies over ...
The long-run U-shaped patterns of economic inequality are standardly explained by basic economic trends (Piketty’s r>g), taxation policies, or “great levelers,” like catastrophes. This paper argues that housing policy, in particular rent control, is a neglected explanatory factor in understanding overall inequality. We hypothesize that rent control could decrease overall housing wealth, lower incomes ...
