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: ...
We study the role of global media during the Greek debt crisis and relate it to the transmission of events on financial actors' expectations. To identify news coverage about the Greek debt crisis, we apply topic modeling to a newly compiled dataset of over 430,000 articles from The International New York Times and Financial Times from 2009 to 2015. We identify a Greek debt crisis topic and relate it ...
Using data for the trades of 19 central banks intervening in currency markets, we show that leaning against the wind by individual central banks leads to "systematic intervention" in the aggregate central banking sector. This systematic intervention is driven by and impacts on the same factors that drive currency excess returns: carry, momentum, value, and a dollar factor. The sensitivity of an individual ...
We propose a new instrument to identify uncertainty shocks in a SVAR model with external instruments. The instrument is constructed by exploiting variations in the price of gold around events that capture periods of changes in uncertainty. The variations in the price of gold around the events correlate with the underlying uncertainty shocks, due to the perception of gold as a safe haven asset. To control ...
This paper examines foreign exchange intervention based on novel daily data covering 33 countries from 1995 to 2011. We find that intervention is widely used and an effective policy tool, with a success rate in excess of 80 percent under somecriteria. The policy works well in terms of smoothing the path of exchange rates, and in stabilizing the exchange rate in countries with narrow band regimes. Moving ...
This paper investigates how the withdrawal of banks from their cross-border business impacted the borrowing costs of European firms since the crisis. We combine aggregate information on total and cross-border credit with firm-level survey data for the period 2010-2014. We find that the decline in cross-border lending led to a deterioration in the borrowing conditions of small firms. In countries with ...
Minimum wages may be an important instrument to reduce income inequality in a society and to promote socially inclusive economic growth. While higher minimum wages can support the Chinese transformation towards consumption driven growth, they can worsen the price competitiveness in export markets. As they differ throughout the country, this paper investigates their determinants at the regional level. ...
China's government is promoting the shift towards a consumption-based economy since a few years. The explicit goal to significantly raise the percentage of wages in the national household income is integral part of the 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-15). The changes in the economic strategy are likely to affect the attractiveness of the country to foreign investors. In this paper, we raise the hypothesis ...
The wage curve introduced by Blanchflower and Oswald (1990, 1994) postulates a negative correlation between wages and unemployment. Empirical results focus on particular theoretical channels establishing the relationship. Panel models mostly draw on unionized bargaining or the efficiency wage hypothesis. Spatial econometric approaches can be rationalized by monopsonistic competition. However, the approaches ...
Are capital controls and macroprudential measures related to international exposures successful in achieving their objectives? Assessing their effectiveness is complicated by selection bias; countries which change their capital-flow management measures (CFMs) often share specific characteristics and are responding to changes in variables that the CFMs are intended to influence. This paper addresses ...
