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DIW Discussion Papers 2072 / 2024
We estimate the macroeconomic effects of import tariffs and trade policy uncertainty in the United States, combining theory-consistent and narrative sign restrictions on Bayesian SVARs. We find mostly adverse consequences of protectionism. Tariff shocks are more important than trade policy uncertainty shocks. Tariff shocks depress trade, investment, and output persistently, in aggregate and across ...
2024| Lukas Boer, Malte Rieth
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DIW Discussion Papers 2068 / 2024
This study provides the first absolute income mobility estimates for postwar Germany. Using various micro data sources, we uncover a steep decline in absolute mobility rates from 81 percent to 59 percent for children’s birth cohorts 1962 through 1988. This trend is robust across different ages, family sizes, measurement methods, copulas, and data sources. Across the parental income distribution, we ...
2024| Timm Bönke, Astrid Harnack-Eber, Holger Lüthen
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DIW Discussion Papers 2067 / 2024
Entrepreneurs tend to be risk tolerant but is more risk tolerance always better? In a sample of about 2,100 small businesses, we find an inverted U-shaped relation between risk tolerance and profitability. This relationship holds in a simple bilateral regression and also when we control for a large set of individual and business characteristics. Apparently, one major transmission goes from risk tolerance ...
2024| Melanie Koch, Lukas Menkhoff
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DIW Discussion Papers 2065 / 2023
This paper examines whether biased income expectations due to overconfidence lead to higher levels of debt-taking. We show suggestive evidence for a link between overconfidence and borrowing behavior in a representative survey of German households (GSOEP-IS). This motivates a laboratory experiment to study causality behind these effects. In two experiments, participants can purchase goods by borrowing ...
2023| Antonia Grohmann, Lukas Menkhoff, Christoph Merkle, Renke Schmacker
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DIW Discussion Papers 2063 / 2023
We study the role of international financial integration in buffering natural disaster shocks, using a large sample of advanced and emerging economies. Conditioning on such exogenous events addresses the endogeneity between financial structures and economic conditions. We document that integration improves shock absorption: output, consumption, and investment are significantly higher after a shock ...
2023| Franziska Bremus, Malte Rieth
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DIW Discussion Papers 2061 / 2023
Housing bubbles and crashes are catastrophic events for economies, implying enormous destruction of housing wealth, financial default risks, construction unemployment, and business cycle downturns. This paper investigates whether governmental housing policies can affect economies’ propensity to build up speculative house price bubbles. Specifically, we focus on the liberalization effects of rent and ...
2023| Konstantin A. Kholodilin, Sebastian Kohl, Florian Müller
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DIW Discussion Papers 2058 / 2023
We develop a two-country business-cycle model of the US and the rest of the world with dollar dominance in trade invoicing, in cross-border credit, and in safe assets. The interplay between these elements—dollar trinity—rationalizes salient features of the Global Financial Cycle in the data: When its tide subsides, the dollar appreciates, financial conditions tighten, the world business cycle slows ...
2023| Georgios Georgiadis, Gernot J. Müller, Ben Schumann
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DIW Discussion Papers 2057 / 2023
The dollar is a safe-haven currency and appreciates when global risk goes up. We investigate the dollar’s role for the transmission of global risk to the world economy within a Bayesian proxy structural vectorautoregressive model. We identify global risk shocks using high-frequency asset-price surprises around narratively selected events. Global risk shocks appreciate the dollar, induce tighter global ...
2023| Georgios Georgiadis, Gernot J. Müller, Ben Schumann
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DIW Discussion Papers 2056 / 2023
The distributional and disruptive effects of energy supply shocks are potentially large. We study the effectiveness of alternative fiscal responses in a two-country HANK model that we calibrate to the euro area. Energy subsidies can stabilize the domestic economy, but are fiscally costly and generate adverse spillovers to the rest of the monetary union: What the subsidizing country gains, the other ...
2023| Christian Bayer, Alexander Kriwoluzky, Gernot J. Müller, Fabian Seyrich
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DIW Discussion Papers 2044 / 2023
How does a monetary union alter the impact of business cycle shocks at the household level? We develop a Heterogeneous Agent New Keynesian model of two countries (HANK2) and show in closed form that a monetary union shifts the adjustment to a shock horizontally—across countries—within the brackets of the union-wide wealth distribution rather than vertically—that is, across the brackets of the union-wide ...
2023| Christian Bayer, Alexander Kriwoluzky, Gernot J. Müller, Fabian Seyrich