A personal bankruptcy law that allows for a "fresh start" after bankruptcy reduces the individual risk involved in entrepreneurial activity. On the other hand, as risk shifts to creditors who recover less of their credit after a debtor's bankruptcy, lenders may charge higher interest rates or...

Capital flows and real estate are pro-cyclical, and real estate has a substantial weight in economies' income and wealth. In this paper, we study the role of real estate markets in the transmission of bank flow shocks to output growth across German cities. The empirical analysis relies on a new...

This paper addresses the question of how firms react to tax incentives in a formula apportionment (FA) tax regime. Under FA, profits of all consolidated entities of a business group are summed and then allocated according to a formula based on FA factors. We hypothesize that firms may change the...

Because judges exercise discretion in how they handle and decide cases, heterogeneity across judges can affect case outcomes and, thus, preferences among litigants for particular judges. However, selection obscures the causal mechanisms that drive these preferences. We overcome this challenge by...

We analyze the extent to which private defensive litigation insurance deters patent assertion by non-practicing entities (NPEs). We study the effect that a patent-specific defensive insurance product, offered by a leading litigation insurer, had on the litigation behavior of insured patents’...

We show that central bank lending against lower quality collateral can improve conditions in the repo market. For identification we take advantage of a pandemic- related temporary extension of the collateral framework of the European Central Bank (ECB), which allows banks to pledge previously...

We study the preferential treatment of green bonds in the central bank collateral framework as an environmental policy instrument within a DSGE model with environmental and financial frictions. In the model, green and carbon-emitting conventional firms issue defaultable corporate bonds to banks...

The Eurosystem’s Public Sector Purchase Programme (PSPP) increased the scarcity of safe assets, which caused significant declines and substantial dispersion in European repo rates. However, banks holding these safe assets benefited from this development: First, using the German security...