-
Refereed essays Web of Science
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 (German Socio-Economic Panel–Innovation Sample [GSOEP-IS]). This motivates a laboratory experiment to study causality behind these effects. In two experiments, ...
In:
Journal of Money, Credit and Banking
(2024), im Ersch. [online first: 2024-05-24]
| Antonia Grohmann, Lukas Menkhoff, Christoph Merkle, Renke Schmacker
-
Refereed essays Web of Science
Rent control is a highly debated social policy that has been omnipresent since World War I. Since the 2010s, it is experiencing a true renaissance, for many cities and countries facing chronic housing shortages are desperately looking for solutions, directing their attention to controling housing rents and other restrictive policies. Is rent control useful or does it create more damage than utility? ...
In:
Journal of Housing Economics
63 (2024), 101983, 19 S.
| Konstantin A. Kholodilin
-
Diskussionspapiere 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
-
DIW Weekly Report 50/51/52 / 2023
The recovery of the German economy is becoming an exercise in patience. In the third quarter of 2023 the economy fared worse than expected, in particular because private households continued to spend their money conservatively despite climbing wages and falling inflation. Both private consumption and overall economic output even declined slightly. Now the next challenge has arrived: In November 2023, ...
2023| Timm Bönke, Geraldine Dany-Knedlik, Guido Baldi, Hella Engerer, Pia Hüttl, Konstantin A. Kholodilin, Frederik Kurcz, Theresa Neef, Laura Pagenhardt, Werner Roeger, Marie Rullière, Jan-Christopher Scherer, Teresa Schildmann, Ruben Staffa, Kristin Trautmann
-
Diskussionspapiere 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
-
DIW Weekly Report 43/44 / 2023
The unequal distribution of labor income in Germany is a hotly debated topic among policymakers and the general public alike. However, the relevant data for calculating the distribution is usually available with a delay of sometimes over two years. Accordingly, previous studies have only been about the past, not the current, distribution. Generally, the current development of the income distribution ...
2023| Timm Bönke, Geraldine Dany-Knedlik, Laura Pagenhardt
-
Diskussionspapiere 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
-
Refereed essays Web of Science
This study constructs a comprehensive wealth distribution for Germany to inform debate in Germany and internationally on the distribution of wealth including pension entitlements. We estimate the net present value of pension wealth in Germany in 2012 and 2017 using Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) data. When including pension wealth, German households’ wealth-income ratio increases from 570% to 850% in ...
In:
Economics Letters
231 (2023), 111299, 5 S.
| Charlotte Bartels, Timm Bönke, Rick Glaubitz, Markus M. Grabka, Carsten Schröder
-
DIW Weekly Report 29/30/31 / 2023
In the 24 years since its introduction, the euro has experienced a financial crisis, a government debt crisis, a global pandemic, and an energy crisis—and survived. Using a model focusing on households, this Weekly Report shows that the monetary union’s stability is rooted in the fact that the middle class neither gains nor loses significantly relative to an independent currency following business ...
2023| Christian Bayer, Alexander Kriwoluzky, Gernot Müller, Fabian Seyrich
-
Diskussionspapiere 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