This paper provides compelling evidence that equity market liberalization, the most efficient way to smooth financial market frictions such as credit constraints, can alleviate persistent cross-dynastic income inequality through increasing the accumulation of human capital. We examine the impact...

In the discussion about the structure and evolution of financial systems, the US separated and the German universal banking system are commonly considered as antipodes. This paper shows that the differences in the role of banks in these two economies are less pronounced than the conventional...

This paper presents an online-experiment on overconfidence in the context of financial markets. Our subject pool consists of institutional investors, investment advisors and individual investors, all of them being registered users of a large online platform for market sentiment data. Due to...

The paper starts with a short survey on the main ideas of portfolio theory. Based on this, mean-variance efficient portfolios (stock as well as bond portfolios) for German investors of different degrees of risk aversion are constructed. It is shown that for them international diversification of...

The economics profession appears to have been unaware of the long build-up to the current worldwide financial crisis and to have significantly underestimated its dimensions once it started to unfold. In our view, this lack of understanding is due to a misallocation of research efforts in...

Bond as well as stock portfolios of German investors are compared to the respective mean-variance-efficient portfolios. It is found that independent of the investors' degree of risk aversion, German investors' portfolios deviate significantly from the mean-variance-efficient ones, especially the...

A fall in house prices due to a change in its fundamental value redistributes wealth from those long housing (for whom the fundamental value of the house they own exceeds the present discounted value of their planned future consumption of housing services) to those short housing. In a closed...

The construction bust which accompanied the Great Recession, and the accompanying need to shift workers across sectors, have provoked a discussion about mismatch and the Beveridge Curve, alongside a discussion about firm-level dispersion. These discussions echo an ongoing discussion about the...

DSGE models with generalized shock processes have been a major area of research in recent years. In this paper, I show that the structural parameters governing DSGE models are not identified when the driving process behind the model follows an unrestricted VAR. This finding implies that...

Much of the literature on the effect of housing wealth on consumption has been embedded in a simple life-cycle model in which housing price changes work as a wealth effect. In such models, windfall gains in housing always lead to positive changes in consumption. However, this might constitute a...