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COVID-19 brought about a shift in entrepreneurial opportunities and in the United States. In this paper, we proxy entrepreneurial processes by examining housing prices in different regions of the United States. Housing prices capture the movement in people, tax dynamics, and behavioral preferences for equity ownership in different regions and over time, all of which were drastically impacted by COVID-19. We examine all U.S. equity crowdfunding offerings starting with the very first offerings in 2016 Q2 until 2021 Q1 based on data from the Securities and Exchange Commission. The data indicate that regional housing prices post-COVID-19 are a strong predictor of the number of equity crowdfunding campaigns and the amount of capital raised. The impact of housing price changes on crowdfunding is more pronounced among more prosperous regions. The housing price effect is robust to numerous controls and consideration of outliers.
Leveraging data from a leading FinTech peer-to-peer lending platform in the United States, allowing us to capture both individuals’ successful and unsuccessful loan applications, we test the effect of FinTech loans on subsequent employment choice and future financial performance of serial borrowers, those repeatedly soliciting loans on the platform. An analysis of 198,984 loan requests made by 92,382 individuals shows that a failed loan application increases the probability of switching employment status. Self-employed individuals are 22% more likely to switch to becoming an employee following an unsuccessful loan application. This probability increases to 31% for those in the lowest income decile and decreases to 13% for those in the highest income decile. We document an improvement in monthly income and credit access following a successful loan application. However, this enhancement is asymmetric. Monthly income enhancement is 3.11 times larger for self-employed individuals in the lowest income decile relative to individuals in the highest income decile. Access to credit enhancement is 1.85 times larger for self-employed individuals in the lowest credit access decile relative to individuals in the second highest credit access decile.
We consider whether traders are more likely to commit securities violations when trading at home, a new form of working induced by the Covid pandemic. We examine data pre- and post-Covid, during which some traders were unexpectedly forced to work at home. The data indicate the presence of both a treatment and a selection effect, where work at home exhibits fewer misconduct cases. Work at home is associated with fewer cases of trading misconduct, although no difference in communications misconduct. The economic significance of working from home on trading misconduct is large for both the treatment and selection effects.
The nominee approach to equity crowdfunding pools all crowd investors into one (nominee) account where typically the platform acts as the legal owner but the crowd retains beneficial ownership. The platform plays an active digital corporate governance role that simultaneously enfranchises crowd investors with voting and ownership rights but removes the administrative burden on startups of having to deal with several hundred shareholders. Through an inter-platform and intra-platform analysis of a large sample of 1,018 initial equity crowdfunding campaigns, this paper assesses both the short-term and the long-term impact of nominee versus direct ownership. It finds that nominee initial campaigns are on average more successful than direct ownership campaigns in that they are more likely to succeed, raise more funds, attract overfunding and enjoy greater long run success in terms of successful seasoned equity crowdfunded offerings, numbers of such offerings, and probability of survival. These results hold inter-platform between the two main UK equity crowdfunding platforms (Seedrs and Crowdcube) as well as intra-platform, using the post-2015 quasi-natural experiment when the nominee approach became an option for startups raising capital on Crowdcube.
Non-standard errors
(2021)
In statistics, samples are drawn from a population in a data-generating process (DGP). Standard errors measure the uncertainty in sample estimates of population parameters. In science, evidence is generated to test hypotheses in an evidence-generating process (EGP). We claim that EGP variation across researchers adds uncertainty: non-standard errors. To study them, we let 164 teams test six hypotheses on the same sample. We find that non-standard errors are sizeable, on par with standard errors. Their size (i) co-varies only weakly with team merits, reproducibility, or peer rating, (ii) declines significantly after peer-feedback, and (iii) is underestimated by participants.
The importance of agile methods has increased in recent years, not only to manage software development processes but also to establish flexible and adaptive organisational structures, which are essential to deal with disruptive changes and build successful digital business strategies. This paper takes an industry-specific perspective by analysing the dissemination, objectives and relative popularity of agile frameworks in the German banking sector. The data provides insights into expectations and experiences associated with agile methods and indicates possible implementation hurdles and success factors. Our research provides the first comprehensive analysis of agile methods in the German banking sector. The comparison with a selected number of fintechs has revealed some differences between banks and fintechs. We found that almost all banks and fintechs apply agile methods in IT-related projects. However, fintechs have relatively more experience with agile methods than banks and use them more intensively. Scrum is the most relevant framework used in practice. Scaled agile frameworks are so far negligible in the German banking sector. Acceleration of projects is apparently the most important objective of deploying agile methods. In addition, agile methods can contribute to cost savings and lead to improved quality and innovation performance, though for banks it is evidently more challenging to reach their respective targets than for fintechs. Overall our findings suggest that German banks are still in a maturing process of becoming more agile and that there is room for an accelerated adoption of agile methods in general and scaled agile frameworks in particular.
We propose three governance mechanisms pertinent to equity crowdfunding and campaign success through mitigating pronounced information asymmetries and agency problems. First, unlike IPOs for which the effect of Delaware incorporation has declined or disappeared over time, we propose Delaware incorporation matters a great deal for success in the new setting of equity crowdfunding. Second, we propose that security design is a critical tool for equity crowdfunding success and even more important than the limited 2-year financial statement disclosure. Third, we propose that platforms as intermediaries between entrepreneurs and investors play an important role in mitigating and sometimes exacerbating information asymmetries and agency problems. The population of equity crowdfunding campaigns from market inception in May 2016 to Q2, 2021 in the United States provides strong support for these propositions.
As part of the Next Generation EU (NGEU) program, the European Commission has pledged to issue up to EUR 250 billion of the NGEU bonds as green bonds, in order to confirm their commitment to sustainable finance and to support the transition towards a greener Europe. Thereby, the EU is not only entering the green bond market, but also set to become one of the biggest green bond issuers. Consequently, financial market participants are eager to know what to expect from the EU as a new green bond issuer and whether a negative green bond premium, a so-called Greenium, can be expected for the NGEU green bonds. This research paper formulates an expectation in regards to a potential Greenium for the NGEU green bonds, by conducting an interview with 15 sustainable finance experts and analyzing the public green bond market from September 2014 until June 2021, with respect to a potential green bond premium and its underlying drivers. The regression results confirm the existence of a significant Greenium (-0.7 bps) in the public green bond market and that the Greenium increases for supranational issuers with AAA rating, such as the EU. Moreover, the green bond premium is influenced by issuer sector and credit rating, but issue size and modified duration have no significant effect. Overall, the evaluated expert interviews and regression analysis lead to an expected Greenium for the NGEU green bonds of up to -4 bps, with the potential to further increase in the secondary market.
Target date funds in corporate retirement plans grew from $5B in 2000 to $734B in 2018, partly because federal regulation sanctioned these as default investments in automatic enrollment plans. We show that adopters delegated pension investment decisions to fund managers selected by plan sponsors. Including these funds in retirement saving menus raised equity shares, boosted bond exposures, curtailed cash/company stock holdings, and reduced idiosyncratic risk. The adoption of low-cost target date funds may enhance retirement wealth by as much as 50 percent over a 30-year horizon.
A series of recent articles has called into question the validity of VAR models of the global market for crude oil. These studies seek to replace existing oil market models by structural VAR models of their own based on different data, different identifying assumptions, and a different econometric approach. Their main aim has been to revise the consensus in the literature that oil demand shocks are a more important determinant of oil price fluctuations than oil supply shocks. Substantial progress has been made in recent years in sorting out the pros and cons of the underlying econometric methodologies and data in this debate, and in separating claims that are supported by empirical evidence from claims that are not. The purpose of this paper is to take stock of the VAR literature on global oil markets and to synthesize what we have learned. Combining this evidence with new data and analysis, I make the case that the concerns regarding the existing VAR oil market literature have been overstated and that the results from these models are quite robust to changes in the model specification.
This paper sets up an experimental asset market in the laboratory to investigate the effects of ambiguity on price formation and trading behavior in financial markets. The obtained trading data is used to analyze the effect of ambiguity on various market outcomes (the price level, volatility, trading activity, market liquidity, and the degree of speculative trading) and to test the quality of popular empirical market-based measures for the degree of ambiguity. We find that ambiguity decreases market prices and trading activity; ambiguity leads to lower market liquidity through wider bid-ask spreads; and ambiguity leads to less speculative trading. We also find that popular market-based measures of ambiguity used in the empirical literature do not seem to correctly capture the true degree of ambiguity.
Several recent studies have expressed concern that the Haar prior typically imposed in estimating sign-identi.ed VAR models may be unintentionally informative about the implied prior for the structural impulse responses. This question is indeed important, but we show that the tools that have been used in the literature to illustrate this potential problem are invalid. Speci.cally, we show that it does not make sense from a Bayesian point of view to characterize the impulse response prior based on the distribution of the impulse responses conditional on the maximum likelihood estimator of the reduced-form parameters, since the the prior does not, in general, depend on the data. We illustrate that this approach tends to produce highly misleading estimates of the impulse response priors. We formally derive the correct impulse response prior distribution and show that there is no evidence that typical sign-identi.ed VAR models estimated using conventional priors tend to imply unintentionally informative priors for the impulse response vector or that the corre- sponding posterior is dominated by the prior. Our evidence suggests that concerns about the Haar prior for the rotation matrix have been greatly overstated and that alternative estimation methods are not required in typical applications. Finally, we demonstrate that the alternative Bayesian approach to estimating sign-identi.ed VAR models proposed by Baumeister and Hamilton (2015) su¤ers from exactly the same conceptual shortcoming as the conventional approach. We illustrate that this alternative approach may imply highly economically implausible impulse response priors.
Since the 1970s, exports and imports of manufactured goods have been the engine of international trade and much of that trade relies on container shipping. This paper introduces a new monthly index of the volume of container trade to and from North America. Incorporating this index into a structural macroeconomic VAR model facilitates the identification of shocks to domestic U.S. demand as well as foreign demand for U.S. manufactured goods. We show that, unlike in the Great Recession, the primary determinant of the U.S. economic contraction in early 2020 was a sharp drop in domestic demand. Although detrended data for personal consumption expenditures and manufacturing output suggest that the U.S. economy has recovered to near 90% of pre-pandemic levels as of March 2021, our structural VAR model shows that the component of manufacturing output driven by domestic demand had only recovered to 59% of pre-pandemic levels and that of real personal consumption only to 76%. The difference is mainly accounted for by unexpected reductions in frictions in the container shipping market.
Using the exact wording of the ECB’s definition of price-stability, we started a representative online survey of German citizens in January 2019 that is designed to measure long-term inflation expectations and the credibility of the inflation target. Our results indicate that credibility has decreased in our sample period, particularly in the course of the deep recession implied by the COVID-19 pandemic. Interestingly, even though inflation rates in Germany have been clearly below 2% for several years, credibility has declined mainly because Germans increasingly expect that inflation will be much higher than 2% over the medium term. We investigate how inflation expectations and the impact of the pandemic depend on personal characteristics including age, gender, education, income, and political attitude.
We raise some critical points against a naïve interpretation of “green finance” products and strategies. These critical insights are the background against which we take a closer look at instruments and policies that might allow green finance to become more impactful. In particular, we focus on the role of a taxonomy and investor activism. We also describe the interaction of government policies with green finance practice – an aspect, which has been mostly neglected in policy debates but needs to be taken into account. Finally, the special case of green government bonds is discussed.
Climate change is one of the highest-ranking issues on the political and social agenda. Vulnerabilities of the world ecosystem laid bare by the COVID-19 pandemic and the potential damage for the human and business life made the need for urgent action clear once again. Corporations are one of the main actors that will play a major role in the decarbonisation of the economy. They need to put forward a net zero strategy and targets, transitioning to net-zero by 2050. Yet, an important but rather overlooked stakeholder group in the sustainability debates can pose a significant stumbling block in this transition: employees. Although climate action has huge benefits by ameliorating adverse environmental events and is expected to have overall positive impact on employment, net zero transition in companies, especially in certain sectors and regions, will cause substantial adverse employment effects for the workforce. This has the potential to slow down or even derail the necessary climate action in companies. In this regard, just transition is a promising concept, which calls for a swift and decisive climate action in corporations while taking account of and mitigating adverse effects for their workforce. If well implemented, it can accelerate net zero transition in companies. This potential clash of environmental (E) and social (S) aspects of ESG agenda, materialised in the companies’ net zero transition, and its potential remedy, just transition, have important implications for corporate governance and finance, especially for directors’ duties & executive remuneration, sustainability disclosures, institutional investors’ engagement and green finance.