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We show that the correct experiment to evaluate the effects of a fiscal adjustment is the simulation of a multi year fiscal plan rather than of individual fiscal shocks. Simulation of fiscal plans adopted by 16 OECD countries over a 30-year period supports the hypothesis that the effects of consolidations depend on their design. Fiscal adjustments based upon spending cuts are much less costly, in terms of output losses, than tax-based ones and have especially low output costs when they consist of permanent rather than stop and go changes in taxes and spending. The difference between tax-based and spending-based adjustments appears not to be explained by accompanying policies, including monetary policy. It is mainly due to the different response of business confidence and private investment.
This paper studies the effect of graduating from college on lifetime earnings. We develop a quantitative model of college choice with uncertain graduation. Departing from much of the literature, we model in detail how students progress through college. This allows us to parameterize the model using transcript data. College transcripts reveal substantial and persistent heterogeneity in students’ credit accumulation rates that are strongly related to graduation outcomes. From this data, the model infers a large ability gap between college graduates and high school graduates that accounts for 54% of the college lifetime earnings premium.
This paper empirically tests the role of bank lending tightening on non-financial corporate (NFC) bond issuance in the eurozone. By utilizing a unique data set provided by the ECB Bank Lending Survey, we capture the "pure" credit supply effect on corporate external financing. We find that tightened credit standards positively affect the NFC bond issuance: A 1pp increase in banks reporting considerable tightening on loans leads to around a 7% increase in firms' bond issuance in the eurozone. Focusing on a spectrum of aspects contributing to bank credit tightening, we document that banks' balance sheet constraints, as well as the perception of risk lead to significantly higher NFC bond issuance. In addition, we show that stricter lending conditions, such as wider margins, higher collateral requirements and covenants significantly increase NFC bond issuance volumes too. Furthermore, the impact of bank credit tightening on firms' bond issuance is particularly observable in core eurozone countries and not in peripheral countries. This is partially due to the underdeveloped of debt capital markets in the peripheral countries.
Although oil price shocks have long been viewed as one of the leading candidates for explaining U.S. recessions, surprisingly little is known about the extent to which oil price shocks explain recessions. We provide the first formal analysis of this question with special attention to the possible role of net oil price increases in amplifying the transmission of oil price shocks. We quantify the conditional recessionary effect of oil price shocks in the net oil price increase model for all episodes of net oil price increases since the mid-1970s. Compared to the linear model, the cumulative effect of oil price shocks over course of the next two years is much larger in the net oil price increase model. For example, oil price shocks explain a 3% cumulative reduction in U.S. real GDP in the late 1970s and early 1980s and a 5% cumulative reduction during the financial crisis. An obvious concern is that some of these estimates are an artifact of net oil price increases being correlated with other variables that explain recessions. We show that the explanatory power of oil price shocks largely persists even after augmenting the nonlinear model with a measure of credit supply conditions, of the monetary policy stance and of consumer confidence. There is evidence, however, that the conditional fit of the net oil price increase model is worse on average than the fit of the corresponding linear model, suggesting much smaller cumulative effects of oil price shocks for these episodes of at most 1%.
The article introduces a research project financed by the Academy of Sciences and Literature Mainz began in 2013 and will extend over an 18-year period. It aims at producing a historical-semantic dictionary elucidating central terms of the School of Salamanca's discourses and their significance for modern political theory and jurisprudence. The project's fundament will be a digital corpus of important texts from the School of Salamanca which will be linked up with the dictionary's online version. By making the source corpus accessible in searchable full text (as well as in high quality digital images), the project is creating a new research tool with exciting possibilities for further investigations. The dictionary will be a valuable source of information for the interdisciplinary research carried out in this field.
After the Global Financial Crisis a controversial rush to fiscal austerity followed in many countries. Yet research on the effects of austerity on macroeconomic aggregates was and still is unsettled, mired by the difficulty of identifying multipliers from observational data. This paper reconciles seemingly disparate estimates of multipliers within a unified and state-contingent framework. We achieve identification of causal effects with new propensity-score based methods for time series data. Using this novel approach, we show that austerity is always a drag on growth, and especially so in depressed economies: a one percent of GDP fiscal consolidation translates into 4 percent lower real GDP after five years when implemented in the slump rather than the boom. We illustrate our findings with a counterfactual evaluation of the impact of the U.K. government’s shift to austerity policies in 2010 on subsequent growth.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
What happened in Cyprus? The economic consequences of the last communist government in Europe
(2014)
This paper reviews developments in the Cypriot economy following the introduction of the euro on 1 January 2008 and leading to the economic collapse of the island five years later. The main cause of the collapse is identified with the election of a communist government in February 2008, within two months of the introduction of the euro, and its subsequent choices for action and inaction on economic policy matters. The government allowed a rapid deterioration of public finances, and despite repeated warnings, damaged the country's creditworthiness and lost market access in May 2011. The destruction of the island's largest power station in July 2011 subsequently threw the economy into recession. Together with the intensification of the euro area crisis in the summer and fall of 2011, these events weakened the banking system which was vulnerable due to its exposure in Greece. Rather than deal with its fiscal crisis, the government secured a loan from the Russian government that allowed it to postpone action until after the February 2013 election. Rather than protect the banking system, losses were imposed on banks and a campaign against them was coordinated and used as a platform by the communist party for the February 2013 election. The strategy succeeded in delaying resolution of the crisis and avoiding short-term political cost for the communist party before the election, but also in precipitating a catastrophe right after the election.
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.