Macroeconomics Department Publications

Quo vadis? Offenlegungen und Klarstellungen im Streit um das Riester-Sparen: Editorial

Does an Aging Capital Stock Adversely Affect Productivity?

The capital stock in Germany and other advanced economies has been aging persistently since 1970s, raising concerns about its implications for productivity, economic growth, and resilience. This study investigates the relationship between capital stock modernity and productivity dynamics using a panel dataset covering 24 European countries between 1997 and 2020. We employ a panel local projections ...

Globalized Consumption Undermines Efficiency-driven Sustainability Gains across Planetary Boundaries

Despite decades of ambitious environmental policy, German consumption has continuously exceeded planetary-boundary thresholds in six of seven environmental dimensions since 1995, with little improvement over time. Combining environmentally extended multiregional input–output tables with life-cycle impact assessment, we develop a consumptionbased sustainability indicator across seven impact categories, ...

Aggregate Tax and Spending Multipliers in a Monetary Union

We examine the aggregate effects of government spending and tax changes in a monetary union. We show theoretically that government consumption and government investment shocks have multipliers above 1, and consumption tax and income tax shocks have multipliers below 1. We test the predictions on quarterly euro area data, identifying the four fiscal shocks in a panel structural vector autoregression ...

Collateral Policy Surprises

Central bank collateral policy specifies which assets banks can pledge as collateral to obtain central bank funding and is an important determinant of liquidity in the banking system. We propose a high-frequency identification approach to study the systematic effects of central bank collateral policy on banks, financial markets, and asset prices. We identify collateral policy surprises using intraday ...

Meeting Climate Targets under Distortionary Fiscal Policy: Directed Technical Change and Learning-by-Doing

I study optimal implementation of climate targets in a model with distortionary fiscal policy, learning-by-doing, and directed technical change. The key mechanism is that fiscal constraints link innovation policy to labor allocation, creating a tension between directing research and directing learning-by-doing. Analytically, I show that learning-by-doing shapes the effectiveness of carbon taxation ...

Global Offshore Wealth, 2001-2023

This paper constructs homogeneous time series of global household offshore wealth covering the 2001–2023 period, during which major international efforts were implemented to curb offshore tax evasion. We find that: (i) global offshore wealth remained broadly stable as a fraction of global GDP since 2001, following a sharp increase in the 1980s and 1990s; (ii) the location of offshore wealth changed ...

Hegemonic Globalization

How do shifts in the global balance of power shape the world economy? We propose a theory of alignment-based “hegemonic globalization,” built on two central premises: countries differ in their preferences over policies (such as the rule of law or regulatory frameworks) and trade between any two countries increases with the degree of alignment in these policies. Hegemons promote policy alignment and ...

Economic Insecurity: Trade Dependencies and Their Weaponization in History

Do trade dependencies leave countries vulnerable to geopolitical coercion? We study the economic costs of trade and financial sanctions, from 1920 to the present. We first develop a continuous measure of sanction intensity, using bilateral commodity-level data to calculate the importance of specific flows that fall under sanctions. We find that sanctions inflict relatively small costs on average: sanctioning ...

Public Policies and the Housing Affordability Gap

Between 1950 and 2023, the housing cost burden — approximated by the proportion of total household consumption expenditure spent on housing, water, electricity and fuel — has risen almost steadily in many countries around the world. First, this trend can be explained by substantial improvements in the quantity and quality of housing. In fact, in some countries (e.g., Germany), per capita floor space ...