Germany’s persistent current account surplus reflects to a large extent low domestic private investment. We argue that two factors—the local fragmentation of Germany’s banking system and the role of local banks in local public finance—can help explain why investment is so low. Local public banks dominate lending to small and medium firms in many regions of Germany. At the...
Abstract: Does distance matter for the volatility of international real and financial transactions? We show that it does, in addition to its well-established relevance for the level of trade. A simple model of trade with endogenous markups shows that demand shocks have a larger impact on trade between more distant countries. We test this implication in two steps, relying on a broad range of real...
Most simulated micro-founded macro models use solely consumer-demand aggregates in order to estimate preference parameters of a representative consumer, for use in policy evaluation. Focusing on dynamic models with time-separable preferences, we show that aggregation holds if, and only if, momentary utility functions fall in the Identical-Shape Harmonic Absolute-Risk Aversion (ISHARA) utility class, ...
Following the identification of interviews that were not conducted In line with the standards of the IAB-BAMF-SOEP group in the first wave of the IAB-BAMF-SOEP Survey of Refugees in 2016 (news and documentation), the project partners and the fieldwork institute substantially enhanced and reinforced their quality control and quality assurance processes. In addition to improvements in fieldwork ...
