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DIW Discussion Papers 2078 / 2024
The low degree of stock market participation (SMP) is one of the big puzzles in finance. Numerous determinants have been proposed. We put these determinants into a structure that is derived from a standard static portfolio model. Then we discuss arguments put forward regarding specific SMP determinants and the empirical evidence that has been provided. The focus of our survey is on the identification ...
2024| Lukas Menkhoff, Jannis Westermann
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DIW Discussion Papers 2075 / 2024
Financial repression lowers the return on government debt and contributes, all else equal, towards its liquidation. However, its full effect on the debt-to-GDP ratio hinges on how repression impacts the economy at large because it alters investment and saving decisions. We develop and estimate a New Keynesian model with financial repression. Based on U.S. data for the period 1948–1974, we find, consistent ...
2024| Martin Kliem, Alexander Kriwoluzky, Gernot J. Müller, Alexander Scheer
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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