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Die Stellungnahme befasst sich mit einem wichtigen Aspekt der Offenlegung der Bezüge von Entscheidungsträgern im Bankensektor. Komplementär zu der Diskussion um die Veröffentlichung der Vergütung von Vorstandsmitgliedern börsennotierter Unternehmen ist auch auf Landeseben versucht worden, die Transparenz der Vergütung von Führungskräften kommunaler oder landeseigener Unternehmen zu erhöhen. Namentlich sind die Träger der Sparkassen durch den neuen § 19 Abs. 6 des Sparkassengesetzes von Nordrhein-Westfalen verpflichtet worden, darauf „hinzuwirken“, dass die „gewährten Bezüge jedes einzelnen Mitglieds des Vorstands, des Verwaltungsrates und ähnlicher Gremien unter Namensnennung“ veröffentlich werden. Diese Vorschrift ist jedoch weitgehend wirkungslos geblieben; nicht zuletzt weil das OLG Köln in einer einstweiligen Verfügung die Vorschrift mangels Gesetzgebungskompetenz des Landes als nichtig behandelt hat. In dieser Situation ist am 8. August 2013 der Vorschlag eines Gesetzes „zur Offenlegung der Bezüge von Sparkassenführungskräften im Internet“ durch die Fraktion der Piraten im Landtag Nordrhein-Westfalen eingebracht worden. Der Entwurf ist Gegenstand der Stellungnahme, die Helmut Siekmann für den Haushalts- und Finanzausschuss des Landtags Nordrhein-Westfalen erstellt hat. Sie stellt maßgebend darauf ab, dass die Sparkassen als Anstalten des öffentlichen Rechts einen öffentlichen Auftrag zu erfüllen haben und den Grundsätzen des Verwaltungsorganisationsrechts unterliegen. Als Teil der (leistenden) Verwaltung müssen sie Transparenz- und Kontrollansprüchen der Bürger und ihren Repräsentanten in den Parlamenten genügen.
This paper investigates the determinants of value and growth investing in a large administrative panel of Swedish residents over the 1999-2007 period. We document strong relationships between a household’s portfolio tilt and the household’s financial and demographic characteristics. Value investors have higher financial and real estate wealth, lower leverage, lower income risk, lower human capital, and are more likely to be female than the average growth investor. Households actively migrate to value stocks over the life-cycle and, at higher frequencies, dynamically offset the passive variations in the value tilt induced by market movements. We verify that these results are not driven by cohort effects, financial sophistication, biases toward popular or professionally close stocks, or unobserved heterogeneity in preferences. We relate these household-level results to some of the leading explanations of the value premium.
On 23 July 2014, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) passed the “Money Market Reform: Amendments to Form PF ,” designed to prevent investor runs on money market mutual funds such as those experienced in institutional prime funds following the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers. The present article evaluates the reform choices in the U.S. and draws conclusions for the proposed EU regulation of money market funds.
Research results confirm the existence of various forms of international tax planning by multinational firms. Prominent examples for firms employing tax avoidance strategies are Amazon, Google and Starbucks. Increasing availability of administrative data for Europe has enabled researchers to study behavioural responses of European multinationals to taxation. The present paper summarizes what we can learn from these recent studies in general and about German multinationals in particular.
We use data from the 2009 Internet Survey of the Health and Retirement Study to examine the consumption impact of wealth shocks and unemployment during the Great Recession in the US. We find that many households experienced large capital losses in housing and in their financial portfolios, and that a non-trivial fraction of respondents have lost their job. As a consequence of these shocks, many households reduced substantially their expenditures. We estimate that the marginal propensities to consume with respect to housing and financial wealth are 1 and 3.3 percentage points, respectively. In addition, those who became unemployed reduced spending by 10 percent. We also distinguish the effect of perceived transitory and permanent wealth shocks, splitting the sample between households who think that the stock market is likely to recover in a year’s time, and those who do not. In line with the predictions of standard models of intertemporal choice, we find that the latter group adjusted much more than the former its spending in response to financial wealth shocks.
The implications of delegating fiscal decision making power to sub-national governments has become an area of significant interest over the past two decades, in the expectation that these reforms will lead to better and more efficient provision of public goods and services. The move towards decentralization has, however, not been homogeneously implemented on the revenue and expenditure side: decentralization has materialized more substantially on the latter than on the former, creating "vertical fiscal imbalances". These imbalances measure the extent to which sub-national governments’ expenditures are financed through their own revenues. This mismatch between own revenues and expenditures may have negative consequences for public finances performance, for example by softening the budget constraint of sub-national governments. Using a large sample of countries covering a long time period from the IMF’s Government Finance Statistics Yearbook, this paper is the first to examine the effects of vertical fiscal imbalances on fiscal performance through the accumulation of government debt. Our findings suggest that vertical fiscal imbalances are indeed relevant in explaining government debt accumulation, and call for a degree of caution when promoting fiscal decentralization.
We examine trust and trustworthiness of individuals with varying professional preferences and experiences. Our subjects study business and economics in Frankfurt, the financial center of Germany and continental Europe. In the trust game, subjects with a high interest in working in the financial industry return 25 percent less than subjects with a low interest. We find no evidence that the extent of professional experience in the financial industry has a negative impact on trustworthiness. We also do not find any evidence that the financial industry screens out less trustworthy individuals in the hiring process. In a prediction game that is strategically equivalent to the trust game, the amount sent by first-movers was significantly smaller when the second-mover indicated a high interest in working in finance. These results suggest that the financial industry attracts less trustworthy individuals, which may contribute to the current lack of trust in its employees.
Trust in policy makers fluctuates signi
cantly over the cycle and affects the transmission mechanism. Despite this it is absent from the literature. We build a monetary model embedding trust cycles; the latter emerge as an equilibrium phenomenon of a game-theoretic interaction between atomistic agents and the monetary authority. Trust affects agents' stochastic discount factors, namely the price of future risk, and through this it interacts with the monetary transmission mechanism. Using data from the Eurobarometer surveys, we analyze the link between trust and the transmission mechanism of macro and monetary shocks: Empirical results are in line with theoretical ones.
On November 8, 2013, several members of the British House of Lords’ Subcommittee A conducted a hearing at the ECB in Frankfurt, Germany, on “Genuine Economic and Monetary Union and its Implications for the UK”. Professors Otmar Issing and Jan Pieter Krahnen were called as expert witnesses.
The testimony began with a general discussion on the elements considered necessary for a functioning internal market. Do economic union and monetary union require a fiscal union or even a political union, beyond the elements of the banking union currently being prepared? In this context, also the critique of the German current account surplus and the international expectations that Germany stimulate internal demand to support growth in crisis countries, were discussed.
With regard to the monetary union, the members of the subcommittee asked for an assessment of how European nations and the banking industry would have fared in the banking crisis that followed the Lehman collapse, had there not been a common currency. Given the important role that the ECB has played in the course of the crisis management, the members further asked for an evaluation of the OMT-program of the ECB and also if the monetary union is in need of common debt instruments, in order to provide the ECB with the possibility of buying EU liabilities, comparable to the Fed buying US Treasury bonds. Finally, the dual role of the ECB for monetary policy and banking supervision was an issue touched on by several questions.
We use a unique data set from the Trade Reporting and Compliance Engine (TRACE) to study liquidity effects in the US structured product market. Our main contribution is the analysis of the relation between the accuracy in measuring liquidity and the potential degree of disclosure. Having access to all relevant trading information, we provide evidence that transaction cost measures that use dealer specific information such as trader identity and trade direction can be efficiently proxied by measures that use less detailed information. This finding is important for all market participants in the context of OTC markets, as it fosters our understanding of the information contained in transaction data. Thus, our results provide guidance for improving transparency while maintaining trader confidentiality. In addition, we analyze liquidity in the structured product market in general and show that securities that are mainly institutionally traded, guaranteed by a federal authority, or have low credit risk, tend to be more liquid.