Topic Monetary Policy

The Signalling Channel of Negative Interest Rates

Negative interest rates remain a controversial policy for central banks. We study a novel signalling channel and ask under what conditions negative rates should exist in an optimal policymaker’s toolkit. We prove two necessary conditions for the optimality of negative rates: a time-consistent policy setting and a preference for policy smoothing. These conditions allow negative rates to signal policy ...

Sovereign Bonds since Waterloo

This paper studies external sovereign bonds as an asset class. It compiles a new database of 266,000 monthly prices of foreign-currency government bonds traded in London and New York between 1815 (the Battle of Waterloo) and 2016, covering up to 91 countries. The main insight is that, as in equity markets, the returns on external sovereign bonds have been sufficiently high to compensate for risk. Real ...

Macroeconomic Policy under Uncertainty and Inequality

Diese Arbeit umfasst drei Kapitel zur Debatte über makroökonomische Politik unter Unsicherheit und Ungleichheit. Das erste Kapitel zeigt auf, dass ein geringes Maß an Unsicherheit mit einer effektiveren Ausgabenpolitik einhergeht, und dass fiskalpolitische Ausgaben grundsätzlich ein wirksames Instrument zur Stabilisierung von Konjunkturzyklen sind. Das zweite Kapitel liefert Belege dafür, dass der ...

Three Essays on the Role of Financial Frictions in Macroeconomics

Diese Dissertation besteht aus drei Aufsätzen, die die Rolle unterschiedlichester Arten von finanziellen Friktionen sowohl auf Firmenseite, als auch auf Bankenseite, für die Übertragung von finanziellen Schocks und Geldpolitik analysieren. Im ersten Aufsatz, "Firm Heterogeneity and the Capital Market", studiere ich welche Art von Finanzbeschränkungen der Firmen für die Übertragung von Kapitalmarktfinanzierungsschocks, ...

Activation of New ECB Emergency Program TPI Has Not Yet Been Required

Since the beginning of 2022, monetary policy in the euro area has been gradually normalizing. As a result, bond yields of highly indebted countries such as Italy and Greece are rising more sharply than those of countries with less debt, such as Germany, a development referred to as bond market fragmentation. To ensure the coherent effectiveness of monetary policy on economic developments and, ultimately, ...

Durable Consumption, Limited VAT Pass-Through and Stabilization Effects of Temporary VAT Changes

This paper revives the question of whether a temporary VAT change is an adequate instrument for crisis stabilization. In empirical assessments, we find that durable goods consumption fluctuates strongly over the business cycle and that VAT rate changes affect durable goods in particular. Therefore, we build a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model that is capable of addressing this major ...

ECB Can Lower Fuel and Heating Costs by Increasing Interest Rates but Would Risk Economic Recovery

Inflation has been growing considerably since the middle of 2021, with rising energy prices driving the increase in particular. Since the end of February 2022, the trend has also been exacerbated by the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. To keep prices stable, the European Central Bank must rein in its accommodative monetary policy. However, would doing so—by enacting an interest rate increase, for ...

Signalling Creditworthiness with Fiscal Austerity

Sovereign borrowers may tighten their fiscal stance in order to signal their creditworthiness to lenders. In a model of sovereign debt with incomplete information, I show that a trustworthy country may reduce its debt beyond the optimal level in order to separate itself from less reliable countries. Since austerity is costly, the gains in the price of debt from separating need to be high enough, as ...

Heteroscedastic Proxy Vector Autoregressions

In proxy vector autoregressive models, the structural shocks of interest are identified by an instrument. Although heteroscedasticity is occasionally allowed for in inference, it is typically taken for granted that the impact effects of the structural shocks are time-invariant despite the change in their variances. We develop a test for this implicit assumption and present evidence that the assumption ...

Productivity Shocks, Long-Term Contracts and Earnings Dynamics