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171
We study the general equilibrium implications of different fiscal policies on macroeconomic quantities, asset prices, and welfare by utilizing two endogenous growth models. The expanding variety model features only homogeneous innovations by entrants. The Schumpeterian growth model features heterogeneous innovations: "incremental" innovations by incumbents and "radical" innovations by entrants. The government levies taxes on labor income and corporate profits and supplies subsidies to consumption, capital investment, and investments in research and development by entrants and, if applicable, incumbents. With these models at hand, we provide new insights on the interplay of innovation dynamics and fiscal policy.
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.
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.
174
We introduce an innovative approach to measure bank integration, based on the corporate culture of multinational banking conglomerates. The new measure, the Power Index, assesses the prevalence of a language of power and authority in the financial reports of global banks. We employ a two-step approach: as a first step, we investigate whether parent-bank or parent-country characteristics are more important for bank integration. In a second step, we analyze whether bank integration affects the transmission of shocks across borders. We find that the level of integration of global banks is determined by parent-bank-specific factors, as well as by the social centralization in the parent’s country: ethnically diverse and linguistically homogenous countries nurture decentralized corporate structures. Political and economic factors, such as corruption, political rights and economic development also affect bank integration. Furthermore, we find that organizational integration affects the transmission of exogenous shocks from parent banks to their subsidiaries: the more centralized a global bank is, the lower the lending of its subsidiaries after a solvency shock. Wholesale shocks do not appear to be transmitted through this channel. Also, past experience with solvency shocks reduces the integration between parents and subsidiaries.
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.
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.
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.
175
We investigate how solvency and wholesale funding shocks to 84 OECD parent banks affect the lending of 375 foreign subsidiaries. We find that parent solvency shocks are more important than wholesale funding shocks for subsidiary lending. Furthermore, we find that parent undercapitalization does not affect the transmission of shocks, while wholesale shocks transmit to foreign subsidiaries of parents that rely primarily on wholesale funding. We also find that transmission is affected by the strategic role of the subsidiary for the parent and follows a locational, rather than an organizational pecking order. Surprisingly, liquidity regulation exacerbates the transmission of adverse wholesale shocks. We further document that parent banks tend to use their own capital and liquidity buffers first, before transmitting. Finally, we show that solvency shocks have higher impact on large subsidiary banks with low growth opportunities in mature markets.
167
We document that natural disasters significantly weaken the stability of banks with business activities in affected regions, as reflected in lower z-scores, higher probabilities of default, higher non-performing assets ratios, higher foreclosure ratios, lower returns on assets and lower bank equity ratios. The effects are economically relevant and suggest that insurance payments and public aid programs do not sufficiently protect bank borrowers against financial difficulties. We also find that the adverse effects on bank stability dissolve after some years if no further disasters occur in the meantime.
162
Asymmetric social norms
(2017)
Studies of cooperation in infinitely repeated matching games focus on homogeneous economies, where full cooperation is efficient and any defection is collectively sanctioned. Here we study heterogeneous economies where occasional defections are part of efficient play, and show how to support those outcomes through contagious punishments.
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.
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.
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.
164
People who delay claiming Social Security receive higher lifelong benefits upon retirement. We survey individuals on their willingness to delay claiming later, if they could receive a lump sum in lieu of a higher annuity payment. Using a moment-matching approach, we calibrate a lifecycle model tracking observed claiming patterns under current rules and predict optimal claiming outcomes under the lump sum approach. Our model correctly predicts that early claimers under current rules would delay claiming most when offered actuarially fair lump sums, and for lump sums worth 87% as much, claiming ages would still be higher than at present.
168
We test two hypotheses, based on sexual selection theory, about gender differences in costly social interactions. Differential selectivity states that women invest less than men in interactions with new individuals. Differential opportunism states that women’s investment in social interactions is less responsive to information about the interaction’s payoffs. The hypotheses imply that women’s social networks are more stable and path dependent and composed of a greater proportion of strong relative to weak links. During their introductory week, we let new university students play an experimental trust game, first with one anonymous partner, then with the same and a new partner. Consistent with our hypotheses, we find that women invest less than men in new partners and that their investments are only half as responsive to information about the likely returns to the investment. Moreover, subsequent formation of students’ real social networks is consistent with the experimental results: being randomly assigned to the same introductory group has a much larger positive effect on women’s likelihood of reporting a subsequent friendship.
177
This paper examines the welfare implications of rising temperatures. Using a standard VAR, we empirically show that a temperature shock has a sizable, negative and statistically significant impact on TFP, output, and labor productivity. We rationalize these findings within a production economy featuring long-run temperature risk. In the model, macro-aggregates drop in response to a temperature shock, consistent with the novel evidence in the data. Such adverse effects are long-lasting. Over a 50-year horizon, a one-standard deviation temperature shock lowers both cumulative output and labor productivity growth by 1.4 percentage points. Based on the model, we also show that temperature risk is associated with non-negligible welfare costs which amount to 18.4% of the agent's lifetime utility and grow exponentially with the size of the impact of temperature on TFP. Finally, we show that faster adaptation to temperature shocks results in lower welfare costs. These welfare benefits become substantially higher in the presence of permanent improvements in the speed of adaptation.
182
Coming early to the party
(2017)
We examine the strategic behavior of High Frequency Traders (HFTs) during the pre-opening phase and the opening auction of the NYSE-Euronext Paris exchange. HFTs actively participate, and profitably extract information from the order flow. They also post "flash crash" orders, to gain time priority. They make profits on their last-second orders; however, so do others, suggesting that there is no speed advantage. HFTs lead price discovery, and neither harm nor improve liquidity. They "come early to the party", and enjoy it (make profits); however, they also help others enjoy the party (improve market quality) and do not have privileges (their speed advantage is not crucial).
183
Fleckenstein et al. (2014) document that nominal Treasuries trade at higher prices than inflation-swapped indexed bonds, which exactly replicate the nominal cash flows. We study whether this mispricing arises from liquidity premiums in inflation-indexed bonds (TIPS) and inflation swaps. Using US data, we show that the level of liquidity affects TIPS, whereas swap yields include a liquidity risk premium. We also allow for liquidity effects in nominal bonds. These results are based on a model with a systematic liquidity risk factor and asset-specific liquidity characteristics. We show that these liquidity (risk) premiums explain a substantial part of the TIPS underpricing.
165
Causality is a widely-used concept in theoretical and empirical economics. The recent financial economics literature has used Granger causality to detect the presence of contemporaneous links between financial institutions and, in turn, to obtain a network structure. Subsequent studies combined the estimated networks with traditional pricing or risk measurement models to improve their fit to empirical data. In this paper, we provide two contributions: we show how to use a linear factor model as a device for estimating a combination of several networks that monitor the links across variables from different viewpoints; and we demonstrate that Granger causality should be combined with quantile-based causality when the focus is on risk propagation. The empirical evidence supports the latter claim.
166
The impact of network connectivity on factor exposures, asset pricing and portfolio diversification
(2017)
This paper extends the classic factor-based asset pricing model by including network linkages in linear factor models. We assume that the network linkages are exogenously provided. This extension of the model allows a better understanding of the causes of systematic risk and shows that (i) network exposures act as an inflating factor for systematic exposure to common factors and (ii) the power of diversification is reduced by the presence of network connections. Moreover, we show that in the presence of network links a misspecified traditional linear factor model presents residuals that are correlated and heteroskedastic. We support our claims with an extensive simulation experiment.
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.
173
We develop a state-space model to decompose bid and ask quotes of CDS into two components, fair default premium and liquidity premium. This approach gives a better estimate of the default premium than mid quotes, and it allows to disentangle and compare the liquidity premium earned by the protection buyer and the protection seller. In contrast to other studies, our model is structurally much simpler, while it also allows for correlation between liquidity and default premia, as supported by empirical evidence. The model is implemented and applied to a large data set of 118 CDS for a period ranging from 2004 to 2010. The model-generated output variables are analyzed in a difference-in-difference framework to determine how the default premium, as well as the liquidity premium of protection buyers and sellers, evolved during different periods of the financial crisis and to which extent they differ for financial institutions compared to non-financials.
172
This paper examines the relationship between oil movements and systemic risk of financial institution in major petroleum-based economies. We estimate ΔCoVaR for those institutions and observe the presence of elevated increases in its levels corresponding to the subprime and global financial crises. The results provide evidence in favor of risk measurement improvements by accounting for oil returns in the risk functions. The spread between the standard CoVaR and the CoVaR that includes oil absorbs in a time range longer than the duration of the oil shock. This indicates that the drop in the oil price has a longer effect on risk and requires more time to be discounted by the financial institutions. To support the analysis, we consider also the other major market-based systemic risk measures.
179
This paper analyses the bail-in tool under the BRRD and predicts that it will not reach its policy objective. To make this argument, this paper first describes the policy rationale that calls for mandatory PSI. From this analysis the key features for an effective bail-in tool can be derived. These insights serve as the background to make the case that the European resolution framework is likely ineffective in establishing adequate market discipline through risk-reflecting prices for bank capital. The main reason for this lies in the avoidable embeddedness of the BRRD’s bail-in tool in the much broader resolution process which entails ample discretion of the authorities also in forcing private sector involvement. Finally, this paper synthesized the prior analysis by putting forward an alternative regulatory approach that seeks to disentangle private sector involvement as a precondition for effective bank-resolution as much as possible form the resolution process as such.
180
The bail-in tool as implemented in the European bank resolution framework suffers from severe shortcomings. To some extent, the regulatory framework can remedy the impediments to the desirable incentive effect of private sector involvement (PSI) that emanate from a lack of predictability of outcomes, if it compels banks to issue a sufficiently sized minimum of high-quality, easy to bail-in (subordinated) liabilities. Yet, even the limited improvements any prescription of bail-in capital can offer for PSI’s operational effectiveness seem compromised in important respects.
The main problem, echoing the general concerns voiced against the European bail-in regime, is that the specifications for minimum requirements for own funds and eligible liabilities (MREL) are also highly detailed and discretionary and thus alleviate the predicament of investors in bail-in debt, at best, only insufficiently. Quite importantly, given the character of typical MREL instruments as non-runnable long-term debt, even if investors are able to gauge the relevant risk of PSI in a bank’s failure correctly at the time of purchase, subsequent adjustment of MREL-prescriptions by competent or resolution authorities potentially change the risk profile of the pertinent instruments. Therefore, original pricing decisions may prove inadequate and so may market discipline that follows from them.
The pending European legislation aims at an implementation of the already complex specifications of the Financial Stability Board (FSB) for Total Loss Absorbing Capacity (TLAC) by very detailed and case specific amendments to both the regulatory capital and the resolution regime with an exorbitant emphasis on proportionality and technical fine-tuning. What gets lost in this approach, however, is the key policy objective of enhanced market discipline through predictable PSI: it is hardly conceivable that the pricing of MREL-instruments reflects an accurate risk-assessment of investors because of the many discretionary choices a multitude of agencies are supposed to make and revisit in the administration of the new regime. To prove this conclusion, this chapter looks in more detail at the regulatory objectives of the BRRD’s prescriptions for MREL and their implementation in the prospectively amended European supervisory and resolution framework.
176
We propose a 2-country asset-pricing model where agents' preferences change endogenously as a function of the popularity of internationally traded goods. We determine the effect of the time-variation of preferences on equity markets, consumption and portfolio choices. When agents are more sensitive to the popularity of domestic consumption goods, the local stock market reacts more strongly to the preferences of local agents than to the preferences of foreign agents. Therefore, home bias arises because home-country stock represents a better investment opportunity for hedging against future fluctuations in preferences. We test our model and find that preference evolution is a plausible driver of key macroeconomic variables and stock returns.
163
The international diffusion of technology plays a key role in stimulating global growth and explaining co-movements of international equity returns. Existing empirical evidence suggests that countries are heterogeneous in their attitude toward innovation: Some countries rely more on technology adoption while other countries rely more on internal technology production. European countries that rely more on adoption are also typically characterized by lower fiscal policy exibility and higher labor market rigidity. We develop a two-country model – where both countries rely on R&D and adoption – to study the short-run and long-run effects of aggregate technology and adoption probability shocks on economic growth in the presence of the aforementioned asymmetries. Our framework suggests that an increase in the ability to adopt technology from abroad stimulates economic growth in the country that benefits from higher adoption rates but the beneficial effects also spread to the foreign country. Moreover, it helps explaining the differences in macro quantities and equity returns observed in the international data.
169
On average young people \undersave" whereas old people \oversave" with respect to the rational expectations model of life-cycle consumption and savings. According to numerous studies on subjective survival beliefs, young people also \underestimate" whereas old people \overestimate" their objective survival chances on average. We take a structural behavioral economics approach to jointly address both empirical phenomena by embedding subjective survival beliefs that are consistent with these biases into a rank-dependent utility (RDU) model over life-cycle consumption. The resulting consumption behavior is dynamically inconsistent. Considering both naive and sophisticated RDU agents we show that within this framework underestimation of young age and overestimation of old age survival probabilities may (but need not) give rise to the joint occurrence of undersaving and oversaving. In contrast to this RDU model, the familiar quasi-hyperbolic discounting (QHD), which is nested as a special case, cannot generate oversaving.
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.
219
We use minutes from 17,000 financial advisory sessions and corresponding client portfolio data to study how active client involvement affects advisor recommendations and portfolio outcomes. We find that advisors confronted with acquiescent clients stick to their standards and recommend expensive but well diversified mutual fund portfolios. However, if clients take an active role in the meetings, advisors deviate markedly from their standards, resulting in poorer portfolio diversification and lower Sharpe ratios. Our findings that advisors cater to client requests parallel the phenomenon of doctors prescribing antibiotics to insistent patients even if inappropriate, and imply that pandering diminishes the quality of advice.
234
A tale of one exchange and two order books : effects of fragmentation in the absence of competition
(2018)
Exchanges nowadays routinely operate multiple, almost identically structured limit order markets for the same security. We study the effects of such fragmentation on market performance using a dynamic model where agents trade strategically across two identically-organized limit order books. We show that fragmented markets, in equilibrium, offer higher welfare to intermediaries at the expense of investors with intrinsic trading motives, and lower liquidity than consolidated markets. Consistent with our theory, we document improvements in liquidity and lower profits for liquidity providers when Euronext, in 2009, consolidated its order ow for stocks traded across two country-specific and identically-organized order books into a single order book. Our results suggest that competition in market design, not fragmentation, drives previously documented improvements in market quality when new trading venues emerge; in the absence of such competition, market fragmentation is harmful.
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.
222
In recent years European financial regulation has experienced a tremendous reorientation with respect to the shadow banking system, which manifested first and foremost in its reframing as market-based finance. Initially identified as a source of systemic risk certain initiatives did not only fall much behind the envisaged changes but all to the contrary have been substantially modified in a way that they now aim at revitalizing these activities. The reorientation of European regulatory agency on shadow banking post-crisis, from curtailing it to facilitating resilient market-based finance, has been a cause for irritation by academic observers, dismissed by some as mere rebranding or taken as a sign of regulatory capture. All to the contrary, this paper documents the central role of regulatory agency in shadow banking’s reconfiguration. It does so by analyzing the European initiatives concerning the regulation of Asset-Backed Commercial Paper (ABCP) and another prime example of shadow banking, Money Market Mutual Funds (MMFs). Based on documentary analysis and expert interviews we trace the way the recently published EU frameworks for MMFs and ABCP have been designed (in particular the STS, CRR and MMF regulation in 2017). Furthermore, we show how they have been transformed in such a way that their final versions allow to re-establish the shadow banking chain linking MMFs, the ABCP market and arguably the regular banking system. This transformation is driven by a new form of pro-active European regulatory agency which aims at creating a regulatory infrastructure able to sustain the orderly flow of real economy debt. Far from being captured by the industry, they did so consciously and in cooperation with private actors in order to maintain a channel for credit creation outside of bank credit, a task made more complicated by the rushed politicized final negotiations coupled with technical complexity. This paper thereby contributes to a new strand of literature, seeing the creation and reconfiguration of the shadow banking system as characterized by the active and conscious role of state actors.
206
We develop a simple theoretical model to motivate testable hypotheses about how peer-to-peer (P2P) platforms compete with banks for loans. The model predicts that (i) P2P lending grows when some banks are faced with exogenously higher regulatory costs; (ii) P2P loans are riskier than bank loans; and (iii) the risk-adjusted interest rates on P2P loans are lower than those on bank loans. We confront these predictions with data on P2P lending and the consumer bank credit market in Germany and find empirical support. Overall, our analysis indicates the P2P lenders are bottom fishing when regulatory shocks create a competitive disadvantage for some banks.
207
The increase in alternative working arrangements has sparked a debate over the positive impact of increased flexibility against the negative impact of decreased financial security. We study the prevalence and determinants of intermediated work in order to document the relative importance of the arguments for and against this recent labor market trend. We link data on individual participation and losses from a Federal Trade Commission settlement with a Multi-Level Marketing firm with detailed county-level information. Participation is greater in middle-income areas and in areas where female labor market non-participation is higher, suggesting that flexibility offers real benefits. However, losses from MLM participation are higher in areas with lower education levels and higher income inequality, suggesting that the downsides of alternative work are particularly high in certain demographics. Our results illustrate that the advantages and disadvantages of alternative work arrangements accrue to different groups.
217
A growing body of literature shows the importance of financial literacy in households' financial decisions. However, fewer studies focus on understanding the determinants of financial literacy. Our paper fills this gap by analyzing a specific determinant, the educational system, to explain the heterogeneity in financial literacy scores across Germany. We suggest that the lower financial literacy observed in East Germany is partially caused by a different institutional framework experienced during the Cold War, more specifically, by the socialist educational system of the GDR which affected specific cohorts of individuals. By exploiting the unique set-up of the German reunification, we identify education as a channel through which institutions and financial literacy are related in the German context.
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.
213
To estimate demand for labor, we use a combination of detailed employment data and the outcomes of procurement auctions, and compare the employment of the winner of an auction with the employment of the second ranked firm (i.e. the runner-up firm). Assuming similar ex-ante winning probabilities for both firms, we may view winning an auction as an exogenous shock to a firm’s production and its demand for labor. We utilize daily data from almost 900 construction firms and about 3,000 auctions in Austria in the time period 2006 until 2009. Our main results show that the winning firm significantly increases labor demand in the weeks following an auction but only in the years before the recent economic crisis. It employs about 80 workers more after the auction than the runner-up firm. Most of the adjustment takes place within one month after the demand shock. Winners predominantly fire fewer workers after winning than runner-up firms. In the crisis, however, firms do not employ more workers than their competitors after winning an auction. We discuss explanations like labor hoarding and productivity improvements induced by the crisis as well discuss implications for fiscal and stimulus policy in the crisis.
211
Bargaining with a bank
(2018)
This paper examines bargaining as a mechanism to resolve information problems. To guide the analysis, I develop a parsimonious model of a credit negotiation between a bank and firms with varying levels of impatience. In equilibrium, impatient firms accept the bank’s offer immediately, while patient firms wait and negotiate price adjustments. I test the empirical predictions using a hand-collected dataset on credit line negotiations. Firms signing the bank’s offer right away draw down their line of credit after origination and default more than late signers. Late signers negotiate price adjustments more frequently, and, consistent with the model, these adjustments predict better ex post performance.
203
his paper studies heterogeneity in the reaction to rank feedback. In a laboratory experiment, individuals take part in a series of dynamic real-effort contests with intermediate feedback. To solve the identification problem in estimating the causal effect of rank feedback on subsequent effort provision we implement a random multiplier in the first round of each contest. The realization of this multiplier then serves as a valid instrument for rank feedback. While rank feedback has a robust effect on subsequent effort provision on average, an explicit analysis of between-subject heterogeneity reveals that a substantial fraction of participants in fact react entirely opposite than the aggregated results indicate. We further show that this heterogeneity has consequences for overall outcomes, thereby arguing that heterogeneous sensitivities to rank feedback could have implications for the design of various policies in education and organizations.
226
We show that bond purchases undertaken in the context of quantitative easing efforts by the European Central Bank created a large mispricing between the market for German and Italian government bonds and their respective futures contracts. On top of the direct effect the buying pressure exerted on bond prices, we show three indirect effects through which the scarcity of bonds, resulting from the asset purchases, drove a wedge between the futures contracts and the underlying bonds: the deterioration of bond market liquidity, the increased bond specialness on the repurchase agreement market, and the greater uncertainty about bond availability as collateral.
220
We examine how a firms' investment behavior affects the investment of a neighboring firm. Economic theory yields ambiguous predictions regarding the direction of firm peer effects and consistent with earlier work, we find that firms display similar investment behavior within an area using OLS analysis. Exploiting time-variation in the rise of U.S. states' corporate income taxes and utilizing heterogeneity in firms' exposure to increases in corporate income tax rates, we identify the causal impact of local firms' investments. Using this as an instrumental variable in a 2SLS estimation, we find that an increases in local firms' investment reduces the investment of a local peer firm. This effect is more pronounced if local competition among firms is stronger and supports theories that firm investments are strategic substitutes due to competition.
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.
204
This paper investigates the effect of the conventional and unconventional (e.g. Quantitative Easing - QE) monetary policy intervention on the insurance industry. We first analyze the impact on the stock performances of 166 (re)insurers from the last QE programme launched by the European Central Bank (ECB) by constructing an event study around the announcement date. Then we enlarge the scope by looking at the monetary policy surprise effects on the same sample of (re)insurers over a timeframe of 12 years, also extending the analysis to the Credit Default Swaps (CDS) market. In the second part of the paper by building a set of balance sheet-based indices, we identify the characteristics of (re)insurers that determine sensitivity to monetary policy actions. Our evidences suggest that a single intervention extrapolated from the comprehensive strategy cannot be utilized to estimate the effect of monetary policy intervention on the market. With respect to the impact of monetary policies, we show how the effect of interventions changes over time. Expansionary monetary policy interventions, when generating an instantaneous reduction of interest rates, generated movement in stock prices in the same direction till September 2010. This effect turned positive during the European sovereign debt crisis. However, the effect faded away in 2014-2015. The pattern is confirmed by the impact on the CDS market. With regard to the determinants of these effects, our analysis suggests that sensitivity is mainly driven by asset allocation and in particular by exposure to fixed income assets.
223
This paper investigates inertia within and across banks in retail deposit markets using detailed panel data on consumer choices and account characteristics. In a structural choice model, I find that costs of inertia are around one third higher for switching accounts across compared to switching within banks. Observable proxies of bank-level switching costs (number and type of additional financial products) explain most of this cost premium, while online banking usage reduces inertia. Consistent with theory, I provide evidence that banks incorporate inertia in their pricing as older accounts pay lower rates than comparable newer accounts. Counterfactual policies reducing inertia shift market share to more competitive smaller banks, but only eliminating inertia within banks already results in high potential gains in consumer surplus. This suggests that facilitating bank switching alone might be insufficient to improve consumer choices.
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We propose a spatiotemporal approach for modeling risk spillovers using time-varying proximity matrices based on observable financial networks and introduce a new bilateral specification. We study covariance stationarity and identification of the model, and analyze consistency and asymptotic normality of the quasi-maximum-likelihood estimator. We show how to isolate risk channels and we discuss how to compute target exposure able to reduce system variance. An empirical analysis on Euro-area cross-country holdings shows that Italy and Ireland are key players in spreading risk, France and Portugal are the major risk receivers, and we uncover Spain's non-trivial role as risk middleman.
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This paper analyzes how the combination of borrowing constraints and idiosyncratic risk affects the equity premium in an overlapping generations economy. I find that introducing a zero-borrowing constraint in an economy without idiosyncratic risk increases the equity premium by 70 percent, which means that the mechanism described in Constantinides, Donaldson, and Mehra (2002) is dampened because of the large number of generations and production. With social security the effect of the zero-borrowing constraint is a lot weaker. More surprisingly, when I introduce idiosyncratic labor income risk in an economy without a zero-borrowing constraint, the equity premium increases by 50 percent, even though the income shocks are independent of aggregate risk and are not permanent. The reason is that idiosyncratic risk makes the endogenous natural borrowing limits much tighter, so that they have a similar effect to an exogenously imposed zero-borrowing constraint. This intuition is confirmed when I add idiosyncratic risk in an economy with a zero-borrowing constraint: neither the equity premium nor the Sharpe ratio change, because the zero-borrowing constraint is already tighter than the natural borrowing limits that result when idiosyncratic risk is added.
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Departing from the principle of absolute priority, CoCo bonds are particularly exposed to bank losses despite not having ownership rights. This paper shows the link between adverse CoCo design and their yields, confirming the existence of market monitoring in designated bail-in debt. Specifically, focusing on the write-down feature as loss absorption mechanism in CoCo debt, I do find a yield premium on this feature relative to equity-conversion CoCo bonds as predicted by theoretical models. Moreover, and consistent with theories on moral hazard, I find this premium to be largest when existing incentives for opportunistic behavior are largest, while this premium is non-existent if moral hazard is perceived to be small. The findings show that write-down CoCo bonds introduce a moral hazard problem in the banks. At the same time, they support the idea of CoCo investors acting as monitors, which is a prerequisite for a meaningful role of CoCo debt in banks' regulatory capital mix.
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This paper provides a complete characterization of optimal contracts in principal-agent settings where the agent's action has persistent effects. We model general information environments via the stochastic process of the likelihood-ratio. The martingale property of this performance metric captures the information benefit of deferral. Costs of deferral may result from both the agent's relative impatience as well as her consumption smoothing needs. If the relatively impatient agent is risk neutral, optimal contracts take a simple form in that they only reward maximal performance for at most two payout dates. If the agent is additionally risk-averse, optimal contracts stipulate rewards for a larger selection of dates and performance states: The performance hurdle to obtain the same level of compensation is increasing over time whereas the pay-performance sensitivity is declining.
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This paper argues that the introduction of the Banking Recovery and Resolution Directive (BRRD) improved market discipline in the European bank market for unsecured debt. The different impact of the BRRD on bank bonds provides a quasi-natural experiment that allows to study the effect of the BRRD within banks using a difference-in-difference approach. Identification is based on the fact that (otherwise identical) bonds of a given bank maturing before 2016 are explicitly protected from BRRD bail-in. The empirical results are consistent with the hypothesis that debt holders actively monitor banks and that the BRRD diminished bail-out expectations. Bank bonds subject to BRRD bail-in carry a 10 basis points bail-in premium in terms of the yield spread. While there is some evidence that the bail-in premium is more pronounced for non-GSIB banks and banks domiciled in peripheral European countries, weak capitalization is the main driver.