Starting from December 2012, insurers in the European Union were prohibited from charging gender-discriminatory prices. We examine the effect of this unisex mandate on risk segmentation in the German health insurance market. While gender used to be a pricing factor in Germany's private health insurance (PHI) sector, it was never used as a pricing factor in the social health insurance (SHI) sector. ...
The paper investigates how endogenous markups affect the extent to which policy reforms can inuence international competitiveness. In a two-country model where trade costs allow for international market segmentation, we show that endogenous pricing-to-market behavior offirms acts as an important transmission channel of the policies. By strengthening the degree of competition between rms, product...
Using an incentivized survey and a representative sample of investors, we elicit ambiguity attitudes toward a familiar company stock, a local stock index, a foreign stock index, and a crypto currency. We separately estimate ambiguity aversion (ambiguity preferences) and perceived ambiguity levels (perceptions about ambiguity), while controlling for unknown likelihood beliefs. We show that...
The paper explores the scope for a federal unemployment insurance scheme in the euro area. It models a union of atomistic member states that have authority over a wide range of domestic labor-market policies. Member states are faced with idiosyncratic business-cycle shocks, but are prevented from international borrowing.Labor-market frictions and wage rigidities mean that business cycles are...
This paper uses a structural vector autoregression identified with the high frequency approach to study the international spillovers of the Fed and ECB monetary policy surprises. It distinguishes between the news about monetary policy (monetary policy shocks) and news about the economy in these surprises. The paper finds that the Fed monetary policy shocks have a very strong effect on the euro...
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...
