This paper studies external sovereign bonds as an asset class. We compile 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. Our main insight is that, as in equity markets, the returns on external sovereign bonds have been sufficiently high to compensate for risk. Real ...
We investigate how internal distribution motives can interfere with the economic objectives of capital controls. In order to do this, we provide a model showing that elite capture can affect optimal debt repatriations and the management of official reserves under capital controls. Relying on these theoretical insights and a wealth of quantitative and qualitative historical evidence, we study one of ...
We estimate the dynamic effects of government spending shocks, using time-varying volatility in US data modeled through a Markov switching process. We find that the average government spending multiplier is significantly and persistently above one, driven by a crowding-in of private consumption and non-residential investment. We rationalize the results empirically through a contemporaneously countercyclical ...
May 2022 marked the 90th anniversary of the end of Heinrich Brüning’s term as Reich Chancellor. To this day, the economic effects of Brüning’s extreme austerity measures remain unclear. However, new data and calculations have made an initial quantification of the economic consequences of Brüning’s policies possible. An analysis based on a time series model illustrates how the Weimar Republic’s economy ...
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 ...
In this paper, we estimate a structural dynamic discrete choice model of informal as well as formal care provision, retirement and labor supply. The model allows to assess the dynamic consequences of providing informal care or organizing formal care for parents, e.g., due to reduced wages, pension benefits, or benefits from long-term care insurance. Further, it allows to analyze counterfactual...
The self-employed are among those facing the highest probability of strong income losses during the COVID-19 pandemic. Governments in many countries introduced support programs to support the self-employed, including the German federal government, which approved a €50bn emergency aid program at the end of March 2020 offering one-off lump-sum payments of up to €15,000 to those facing...
Across the world, tax exemptions for jobs with low earnings intend to incite non-participating workers to rejoin the labor market. However, such tax exemptions may also have negative equilibrium effects. The German minijob tax exemption offers a convenient case to identify equilibrium effects as it applies to some but not to other low-wage jobs. We build and estimate a structural job search model with ...