Topic Business Cycles

Integrating Out Natural Disaster Shocks

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 ...

The Energy-Price Channel of (European) Monetary Policy

This study examines whether central banks can combat inflation that is caused by rising energy prices. By using a high-frequency event study and a Structural Vector Autoregression, we find evidence that the European Central Bank (ECB) and the Federal Reserve (Fed) are capable of doing so by affecting domestic and global energy prices. This “energy-price channel” of monetary policy plays an important ...

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

DIW Berlin Economic Forecast: Forecast Ranges from Cloudy to Bright

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, ...

Estimating the Marginal Costs of Road Renewals: Evidence from a Duration Approach

Within an analytical approach that mirrors the relationship between road deterioration, traffic load, and road renewal, we estimate the marginal costs of road renewals as part of a social marginal cost scheme for road charging. Based on a comprehensive data set for German motor ways, we estimate a Weibull dura tion model with shared frailties that account for unobserved heterogeneity, including covariates ...

Inequality over the Business Cycle: The Role of Distributive Shocks

This paper examines how wealth and income inequality dynamics are related to fluctuations in the functional income distribution over the business cycle. In a panel estimation for OECD countries between 1970 and 2016, although inequality is, on average countercyclical and significantly associated with the capital share, one-third of the countries display a pro- or noncyclical relationship. To analyze ...

Crisis Stress for the Diversity of Financial Portfolios - Evidence from European Households

In this paper, we investigate how European households changed the diversity of their financial portfolios in response to the Great Financial and the subsequent European Debt Crisis. For this purpose we apply a Difference-in-Differences (DiD) approach estimated as a correlated random effects (CRE) model to six waves of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). We find that households ...

Viral Shocks to the World Economy

We construct a global index of epidemic news based on text analysis of newspapers from 17 countries. We apply the index to study the economic consequences of epidemics on the world economy in structural vector autoregressions. Epidemic shocks exert significantly and persistently negative effects on output and prices that last for up to two years. There is no quick recovery and no overshooting. The ...

DIW Economic Outlook: German Economy Fighting Its Way out of Winter Recession

The German economy has returned to a recovery course following a slight recession over the winter. Although the war in Ukraine, record inflation, and feared gas shortages have taken their toll on the German economy, a drastic slump failed to materialize. The German economy remained relatively unscathed, only experiencing a slight recession over the past six months; in the final quarter of 2022 and ...

A Lasting Crisis Affects R&D Decisions of Smaller Firms: The Greek Experience

We use the prolonged Greek crisis as a case study to understand how a lasting economic shock affects the innovation strategies of firms in economies with moderate innovation activities. Adopting the 3-stage CDM model, we explore the link between R&D, innovation, and productivity for different size groups of Greek manufacturing firms during the prolonged crisis. At the first stage, we find that the ...