Topic Financial Markets

4th annual Workshop for Women in Macroeconomics, Finance and Economic History

The 4th annual Workshop for Women in Macroeconomics, Finance and Economic History is being organized by the DIW Berlin. The aim is to bring together female academic researchers and practitioners to promote and exchange ideas in the field of Macroeconomics, Finance, and Economic History. We invite contributions, including, but not limited to macroeconomic and financial stability, interactions...

Debt crises and debt cuts

Monetary Policy and Mispricing in Stock Markets

We investigate the role of monetary policy in stock price misalignments and explore whether central banks can attenuate excessive mispricing as suggested by the proponents of a “leaning against the wind” monetary policy. Decomposing stock prices into expected excess dividends, an equity risk premium, and a mispricing component, we find that prices fall more strongly in response to an increase in the ...

The Macro-Economic Effects of a European Deposit (Re-)Insurance Scheme

Recent proposals for a European deposit insurance scheme (EDIS) favor a reinsurance framework. In this paper, we use a regime-switching open economy DSGE model with bank defaults to assess the relative efficiency of such a scheme. We find that reinsurance by EDIS is more effective in stabilizing real activity, credit, and welfare than a national fiscal backstop. We demonstrate that risk-weighted contributions ...

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 ...

The Impact of Public Procurement on Financial Barriers to General and Green Innovation

This study investigates whether public procurement mitigates or exacerbates innovative enterprises’ financial constraints. We distinguish between general and environmentally beneficial innovative enterprises. Theory suggests that the treatment effects of public procurement, particularly when mediated by the demand-pull effect, may lower a company’s funding constraints for innovation. We test this theory ...

Interest Rates, Convenience Yields, and Inflation Expectations: Drivers of US Dollar Exchange Rates

Using a data-driven approach to identify structural vector autoregressive models, we examine key factors influencing the US dollar exchange rate across eight advanced economies from 1980 to 2022. We find that shocks to inflation expectations, which are closely tied to unfunded government transfer payments, have a pronounced effect on the US dollar’s value. This underscores the fiscal dimension of exchange ...

Sovereign Haircuts: 200 Years of Creditor Losses

We study sovereign external debt crises over the past 200 years, with a focus on creditor losses, or “haircuts”. Our sample covers 327 sovereign debt restructurings with external private creditors over 205 default spells since 1815. Creditor losses vary widely (from none to 100%), but the statistical distribution has remained remarkably stable over two centuries, with an average haircut of around 45 ...

Financial Repression in General Equilibrium: The Case of the United States, 1948–1974

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 ...

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, ...