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202
Germany Inc. was an idiosyncratic form of industrial organization that put financial institutions at the center. This paper argues that the consumption of private benefits in related party transactions by these key agents can be understood as a compensation for their coordinating and monitoring function in Germany Inc. As a consequence, legal tools apt to curb tunneling remained weak in Germany from the perspective of outside shareholders. While banks were in a position to use their firm-level knowledge and influence to limit rent-seeking by other related parties, their own behavior was not subject to meaningful controls. With the dismantling of Germany Inc. banks seized their monitoring function and left an unprecedented void with regard to related party transactions. Hence, a “traditionalist” stance which opposes law reform for related party transactions in Germany negatively affects capital market development, growth opportunities and ultimately social welfare.
201
We characterize the optimal linear tax on capital in an Overlapping Generations model with two period lived households facing uninsurable idiosyncratic labor income risk. The Ramsey government internalizes the general equilibrium feedback of private precautionary saving. For logarithmic utility our full analytical solution of the Ramsey problem shows that the optimal aggregate saving rate is independent of income risk. The optimal time-invariant tax on capital is increasing in income risk. Its sign depends on the extent of risk and on the Pareto weight of future generations. If the Ramsey tax rate that maximizes steady state utility is positive, then implementing this tax rate permanently generates a Pareto-improving transition even if the initial equilibrium is dynamically efficient. We generalize our results to Epstein-Zin-Weil utility and show that the optimal steady state saving rate is increasing in income risk if and only if the intertemporal elasticity of substitution is smaller than 1.
200
This paper investigates the roles psychological biases play in empirically estimated deviations between subjective survival beliefs (SSBs) and objective survival probabilities (OSPs). We model deviations between SSBs and OSPs through age-dependent inverse S-shaped probability weighting functions (PWFs), as documented in experimental prospect theory. Our estimates suggest that the implied measures for cognitive weakness, likelihood insensitivity, and those for motivational biases, relative pessimism, increase with age. We document that direct measures of cognitive weakness and motivational attitudes share these trends. Our regression analyses confirm that these factors play strong quantitative roles in the formation of subjective survival beliefs. In particular, cognitive weakness is an increasingly important contributor to the overestimation of survival chances in old age.
199
This paper is the national report for Germany prepared for the to the 20th General Congress of the International Academy of Comparative Law 2018 and gives an overview of the regulation of crowdfunding in Germany and the typical design of crowdfunding campaigns under this legal framework. After a brief survey of market data, it delineates the classification of crowdfunding transactions in German contract law and their treatment under the applicable conflict of laws regime. It then turns to the relevant rules in prudential banking regulation and capital market law. It highlights disclosure requirements that flow from both contractual obligations of the initiators of campaigns vis-à-vis contributors and securities regulation (prospectus regime). After sketching the most important duties of the parties involved in crowdfunding, the report also looks at the key features of the respective transactions’ tax treatment.
198
This paper revisits the macroeconomic effects of the large-scale asset purchase programmes launched by the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England from 2008. Using a Bayesian VAR, we investigate the macroeconomic impact of shocks to asset purchase announcements and assess changes in their effectiveness based on subsample analysis. The results suggest that the early asset purchase programmes had significant positive macroeconomic effects, while those of the subsequent ones were weaker and in part not significantly different from zero. The reduced effectiveness seems to reflect in part better anticipation of asset purchase programmes over time, since we find significant positive macroeconomic effects when we consider shocks to survey expectations of the Federal Reserve’s last asset purchase programme. Finally, in all estimations we find a significant and persistent positive impact of asset purchase shocks on stock prices.
196
Coordination of circuit breakers? Volume migration and volatility spillover in fragmented markets
(2018)
We study circuit breakers in a fragmented, multi-market environment and investigate whether a coordination of circuit breakers is necessary to ensure their effectiveness. In doing so, we analyze 2,337 volatility interruptions on Deutsche Boerse and research whether a volume migration and an accompanying volatility spillover to alternative venues that continue trading can be observed. Different to prevailing theoretical rationale, trading volume on alternative venues significantly decreases during circuit breakers on the main market and we do not find any evidence for volatility spillover. Moreover, we show that the market share of the main market increases sharply during a circuit breaker. Surprisingly, this is amplified with increasing levels of fragmentation. We identify high-frequency trading as a major reason for the vanishing trading activity on the alternative venues and give empirical evidence that a coordination of circuit breakers is not essential for their effectiveness as long as market participants shift to the dominant venue during market stress.
195
We investigate different designs of circuit breakers implemented on European trading venues and examine their effectiveness to manage excess volatility and to preserve liquidity. Specifically, we empirically analyze volatility and liquidity around volatility interruptions implemented on the German and Spanish stock market which differ regarding specific design parameters. We find that volatility interruptions in general significantly decrease volatility in the post interruption phase. Unfortunately, this decrease in volatility comes at the cost of decreased liquidity. Regarding design parameters, we find tighter price ranges and shorter durations to support volatility interruptions in achieving their goals.
194
I present a new business cycle model in which decision making follows a simple mental process motivated by neuroeconomics. Decision makers first compute the value of two different options and then choose the option that offers the highest value, but with errors. The resulting model is highly tractable and intuitive. A demand function in level replaces the traditional Euler equation. As a result, even liquid consumers can have a large marginal propensity to consume. The interest rate affects consumption through the cost of borrowing and not through intertemporal substitution. I discuss the implications for stimulus policies.
193
This paper analyses whether the post-crisis regulatory reforms developed by global-standard-setting bodies have created appropriate incentives for different types of market participants to centrally clear Over-The-Counter (OTC) derivative contracts. Beyond documenting the observed facts, we analyze four main drivers for the decision to clear: 1) the liquidity and riskiness of the reference entity; 2) the credit risk of the counterparty; 3) the clearing member’s portfolio net exposure with the Central Counterparty Clearing House (CCP) and 4) post trade transparency. We use confidential European trade repository data on single-name Sovereign Credit Derivative Swap (CDS) transactions, and show that for all the transactions reported in 2016 on Italian, German and French Sovereign CDS 48% were centrally cleared, 42% were not cleared despite being eligible for central clearing, while 9% of the contracts were not clearable because they did not satisfy certain CCP clearing criteria. However, there is a large difference between CCP clearing members that clear about 53% of their transactions and non-clearing members, even those that are subject to counterparty risk capital requirements, that almost never clear their trades. Moreover, we find that diverse factors explain clearing members’ decision to clear different CDS contracts: for Italian CDS, counterparty credit risk exposures matter most for the decision to clear, while for French and German CDS, margin costs are the most important factor for the decision. Clearing members use clearing to reduce their exposures to the CCP and largely clear contracts when at least one of the traders has a high counterparty credit risk.
192 n
This paper shows that judicial enforcement has substantial effects on firms’ decisions with regard to their employment policies. To establish causality, I exploit a reorganization of the court districts in Italy involving judicial district mergers as a shock to court productivity. I find that an improvement in enforcement, as measured by a reduction in average trial length, has a large, positive effect on firm employment. These effects are stronger in firms with high leverage, or that belong to industries more dependent on external finance and characterized by higher complementarity between labor and capital, consistent with a financing channel driving the results. Moreover, in presence of stronger enforcement, firms can raise more debt to dampen the impact of negative shocks and, in this way, reduce employment fluctuations.
192
I analyze the real effects of the quality of the judicial enforcement by showing that an increase in the average duration of civil proceedings reduces firms' employment. I exploit a reorganization of court districts in Italy as an exogenous shock to court productivity and, using an instrumental variable approach, estimate an elasticity of employment to average trial length between -0.24 and -0.29. These results are very different from OLS estimates which do not control for endogeneity, and suggest that stronger law enforcement eases financing constraints. The effects are more pronounced in highly levered and more financially dependent firms, and appear to affect mainly firms in less financially developed areas. Revenues respond more slowly than employment to the reform, and wages fall as the judiciary improves. There is no evidence of effects on capital structure and profitability. These results offer a more complete picture of the interplay between legal institutions and real economic outcomes.
191
This paper aims to analyze the effects of financial constraints and the financial crisis on the financing and investment policies of newly founded firms. Thereby, the analysis adds important new insights on a crucial segment of the economy. We make use of a large and comprehensive data set of French firms founded in the years 2004-2006, i.e. well before the financial crisis. Our panel data analysis shows that the global financial crisis imposed a shock (mostly demand-driven) on the financing as well as on the investments of these firms. Moreover, we find that financially constrained firms use less external debt financing and invest smaller amounts. They also rely on less trade credit. With regard to bank financing, newly founded firms which are more financially constrained accumulate less bank debt and repay initial bank debt slower than their non-financially constraint counterparts. Finally, we find that financially constrained firms are affected to a smaller degree by the financial crisis than their less financially constrained counterparts.
190
This Chapter explores how an environment of persistent low returns influences saving, investing, and retirement behaviors, as compared to what in the past had been thought of as more “normal” financial conditions. Our calibrated lifecycle dynamic model with realistic tax, minimum distribution, and Social Security benefit rules produces results that agree with observed saving, work, and claiming age behavior of U.S. households. In particular, our model generates a large peak at the earliest claiming age at 62, as in the data. Also in line with the evidence, our baseline results show a smaller second peak at the (system-defined) Full Retirement Age of 66. In the context of a zero-return environment, we show that workers will optimally devote more of their savings to non-retirement accounts and less to 401(k) accounts, since the relative appeal of investing in taxable versus tax-qualified retirement accounts is lower in a low return setting. Finally, we show that people claim Social Security benefits later in a low interest rate environment.
189
This paper studies the long-run effects of credit market disruptions on real firm outcomes and how these effects depend on nominal wage rigidities at the firm level. I trace out the long-run investment and growth trajectories of firms which are more adversely affected by a transitory shock to aggregate credit supply. Affected firms exhibit a temporary investment gap for two years following the shock, resulting in a persistent accumulated growth gap. I show that affected firms with a higher degree of wage rigidity exhibit a steeper drop in investment and grow more slowly than affected firms with more flexible wages.
188
We shed new light on the macroeconomic effects of rising temperatures. In the data, a shock to global temperature dampens expenditures in research and development (R&D). We rationalize this empirical evidence within a stochastic endogenous growth model, featuring temperature risk and growth sustained through innovations. In line with the novel evidence in the data, temperature shocks undermine economic growth via a drop in R&D. Moreover, in our endogenous growth setting temperature risk generates non-negligible welfare costs (i.e., 11% of lifetime utility). An active government, which is committed to a zero fiscal deficit policy, can offset the welfare costs of global temperature risk by subsidizing the aggregate capital investment with one-fifth of total public spending.
187
This paper presents new evidence on the expectation formation process of firms from a survey of the German manufacturing sector. It focuses on the expectation about their future business conditions, which enters the widely followed economic sentiment index and which is an important determinant of their employment and investment decisions. We find that firms extrapolate their experience too much and make predictable forecasting errors. Moreover, firms do not seem to anticipate the upcoming reversals of business cycle peaks and troughs which causes suboptimal adjustment of investment and employment and affects their inventories and profits. However, the impact on expectation errors decreases with the size and the age of the firm as firms learn to reduce their extrapolation bias over time.
186
We propose a long-run risk model with stochastic volatility, a time-varying mean reversion level of volatility, and jumps in the state variables. The special feature of our model is that the jump intensity is not affine in the conditional variance but driven by a separate process. We show that this separation of jump risk from volatility risk is needed to match the empirically weak link between the level and the slope of the implied volatility smile for S&P 500 options.
185
Empirical evidence suggests that investments in research and development (R&D) by older and larger firms are more spread out internationally than R&D investments by younger and smaller firms. In this paper, I explore the quantitative implications of this type of heterogeneity by assuming that incumbents, i.e. current monopolists engaging in incremental innovation, have a higher degree of internationalization in their R&D technologies than entrants, i.e. new firms engaging in radical innovation, in a two-country endogenous growth general equilibrium model. In particular, this assumption allows the model to break the perfect correlation between incumbents’ and entrants’ innovation probabilities and to match the empirical counterpart exactly.
184
Crowdfunding is a buzzword that signifies a sub-set in the new forms of finance facilitated by advances in information technology usually categorized as fintech. Concerns for financial stability, investor and consumer protection, or the prevention of money laundering or funding of terrorism hinge incrementally on including the new techniques to initiate financing relationships adequately in the regulatory framework.
This paper analyzes the German regulation of crowdinvesting and finds that it does not fully live up to the regulatory challenges posed by this novel form of digitized matching of supply and demand on capital markets. It should better reflect the key importance of crowdinvesting platforms, which may become critical providers of market infrastructure in the not too distant future. Moreover, platforms can play an important role in investor protection that cannot be performed by traditional disclosure regimes geared towards more seasoned issuers. Against this background, the creation of an exemption from the traditional prospectus regime seems to be a plausible policy choice. However, it needs to be complemented by an adequate regulatory stimulation of platforms’ role as gatekeepers.