In Germany, 200 to 400 billion euros are inherited or donated every year. Inheritances are unevenly distributed, with wealthy households receiving far greater inheritances than poor households, and inheritances and gifts are taxed only lightly compared with earned income. As inequalities are increasing, particularly since the onset of the COVID crisis, and governments are under pressure to find...
We disentangle the effects of monetary policy announcements on real economic variables into an interest rate shock component and a central bank information shock component. We identify both components using changes in interest rate futures and in exchange rates around monetary policy announcements. While the volatility of interest rate surprises declines around the Great Recession, the volatility of ...
This dissertation consists of three essays that investigate the effects and transmission mechanisms of monetary policy to the macroeconomy, and the role of financial frictions in modeling the business cycle. The first essay focuses on the question of how to include financial sector dynamics into macroeconomic models in order to improve their efficacy for macroeconomic policy analysis. We augment a ...
Stablecoins issued by large tech companies pose a significant challenge for traditional fiat money. In this study, we highlight the importance of a public-private-cooperation in dealing with this topic, where central banks closely work with stablecoin issuers in issuing synthetic central bank digital currency (sCBDC). This framework minimizes the risks of private money and utilises the technological ...
We study the multifaceted effects and persistence of trade policy shocks on financial markets in a structural vector autoregression. The model is identified via event day heteroskedasticity. We find that restrictive US trade policy shocks affect US and international stock prices heterogeneously, but generally negatively, increasing market uncertainty, lowering interest rates, and leading to an appreciation ...