What are the long-term economic effects of a more equal distribution of wealth? We exploit variation in historical inheritance rules for land traversing political, linguistic, geological, and religious borders in Germany. In some German areas, inherited land was to be shared or divided equally among children, while in others land was ruled to be indivisible. Using a geographic regression discontinuity ...
Given its central role in public accountability and in the formation of expectations, it is important to reflect on ways to improve the ECB’s communication policy. Communication should not generally strive for maximum transparency. The optimum degree of transparency varies between different aspects of monetary policy and banking supervision. Although the ECB already communicates very openly with the ...
To finance resolution funds, the regulatory toolkit has been expanded in many countries by bank levies. In addition, these levies are often designed to reduce incentives for banks to rely excessively on wholesale funding resulting in high leverage ratios. At the same time, corporate income taxation biases banks’ capital structure towards debt financing in light of the deductibility of interest on debt. ...
We analyse the first twenty years of the euro both from an economic and an institutional perspective. We find that in particular during the period since the financial crisis, convergence as measured by a variety of indicators has not improved. Design flaws in the Eurozone institutional architecture have contributed importantly to this lack of convergence. This is why further reforms are urgently needed. ...
Regulatory bank levies set incentives for banks to reduce leverage. At the same time, corporate income taxation makes funding through debt more attractive. In this paper, we explore how regulatory levies affect bank capital structure, depending on corporate income taxation. Based on bank balance sheet data from 2006 to 2014 for a panel of EU-banks, our analysis yields three main results: The introduction ...
We estimate the dynamic effects of government spending shocks, using time-varying volatility in US data modeled through a Markov switching process. We find that the average government spending multiplier is significantly and persistently above one, driven by a crowding-in of private consumption and non-residential investment. We rationalize the results empirically through a contemporaneously countercyclical ...
Against what theory predicts, large productivity gaps across sectors persist and the process of structural transformation is stagnant in many developing economies. This wedge between observed and optimal labor allocations suggests the presence of institutional and market frictions, which impose costs on the reallocation of labor from low to high productivity sectors, thus leading to sub-optimal allocations ...
Stablecoins issued by large tech companies pose a significant challenge for traditional fiat money. In this study, we highlight the importance of a public-private-cooperation in dealing with this topic, where central banks closely work with stablecoin issuers in issuing synthetic central bank digital currency (sCBDC). This framework minimizes the risks of private money and utilises the technological ...
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: ...
