Macroeconomics Department Publications

Is Interest Rate Hiking a Recipe for Missing Several Goals of Monetary Policy—Beating Inflation, Preserving Financial Stability, and Keeping up Output Growth?

levelsof all goods in the US and Europe rose surprisingly quickly and persistently. TheFED began in March 2022 and the ECB in July 2022 with historically unique interestrate increases to combat the wage-price spiral that had not yet begun. In this article weshow that energy, commodities and food were the main drivers of inflation. For this reason,central banks’ goal of weakening demand for labor through ...

What is the Difference between Fossil Fuel Embargo and Price Shocks?

In this paper, we model a fossil fuel embargo as a temporary quantity constraint on fossil fuel imports and wecompare the impact with the effect of a fossil fuel price shock. We show that while both shocks have similar responses of output and inflation, they differ with respect to the reaction of other macroeconomic components,such as consumption, exports and the trade balance. In particular, an embargo ...

Crowding of International Mutual Funds

We study the relationship between crowding and performance in the active mutual fund industry. Using the equity holdings overlap of 17,364 global funds, we find that funds that crowd into the same stocks underperform passive benchmark funds by 1.4% per year. The negative returns to crowding can at least in part be explained by excess demand for liquidity and the associated discount for holding liquid ...

Active or Passive? Revisiting the Role of Fiscal Policy during High Inflation

We investigate the interplay of the monetary–fiscal policy mix during times of crisis by drawing insights from the Great Inflation of the 1960s and 1970s. We use a Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) algorithm to estimate a DSGE model with three distinct monetary/fiscal policy regimes. We show that, in such a model, SMC outperforms standard sampling algorithms because it is better suited to deal with multimodal ...

Weather-Related Disasters and Inflation in the Euro Area

This article investigates the impact of weather-related disasters on inflation in the euro area over the period 1996–2021. Using a panel structural vector autoregression approach, we explore whether weather-related disasters have a significant and persistent effect on inflation, as well as the role that demand-side and supply-side channels play as drivers of inflation. We also analyse the heterogeneous ...

Rising Allowances, Rising Rates — Can Growth Arise through Business Income Tax Reform despite Government Debt Limit?

The system of business income taxation consists of two instruments, namely a statutory tax rate and a depreciation allowance on investment. We will show in this paper that by acting on both instruments simultaneously it is possible to achieve both a growth and a fiscal net revenue target even in cases when a trade-off prevails when each instrument is used individually.As will be shown in the paper, ...

Certification against Greenwashing in Nascent Bond Markets: Lessons from African ESG Bonds

Africa is one of the most vulnerable continents to climate change. Climate and sustainability-linked bonds can provide funding to African governments and corporations for projects that help to mitigate climate change, combat biodiversity loss, and foster sustainable development. However, less than 0.3% of the global environmental, social, governance (ESG) bond issuance volume is devoted to projects ...

Social Policy or Crowding-out? Tenant Protection in Comparative Long-run Perspective

Private rental markets have become increasingly important since the Global Financial Crisis 2008–2009 and rent controls are back on the political agenda. Yet, they have received less attention from housing scholars than homeownership and public housing. This paper presents new data on the development of private tenancy legislation based on a content-coding of rent control, protection of tenants from ...

Disentangling COVID-19, Economic Mobility, and Containment Policy Shocks

We study the dynamic interaction between COVID-19, economic mobility, and containment policy. We use Bayesian panel structural vector autoregressions with daily data for 44 countries, identified through traditional and narrative sign restrictions. We find that incidence shocks and containment shocks have large and persistent effects on mobility, morbidity, and mortality that last for one to two months. ...

Do Rent Controls and Other Tenancy Regulations Affect New Construction? Some Answers from Long-Run Historical Evidence