The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we present an up-to-date assessment of the differences across euro area countries in the distributions of various measures of debt conditional on household characteristics. We consider three different outcomes: the probability of holding debt, the amount...

Excessive household borrowing has been identified as an important determinant of financial crises. Borrower-based macroprudential instruments have been proposed as a possible remedy. In Germany, two instruments have been available to macroprudential supervisors since 2017: a cap on the...

This paper documents significant cross-border effects of the 2014 US money market fund (MMF) reform on MMFs in the euro area. As US-based prime MMFs became less money-like due to the reform, euro area-based prime MMFs received large inflows from foreign investors. These cross-border flows were...

What is the impact of a sudden and sizeable increase in bank capital requirements on the lending activity by directly affected banks and by non-affected non-bank financial institutions (NBFIs)? To answer this question, we apply a difference-in-differences methodology around the capital exercise...

Using a unique data set that contains the complete ownership structure of the German stock market, we study the momentum and contrarian trading of different investor groups. Foreign investors and financial institutions, and especially mutual funds, are momentum traders, whereas private...

This paper analyzes how newly introduced transparency requirements for short positions affect investors' behavior and security prices. Employing a unique data set, which contains both public positions above and confidential positions below the regulatory disclosure threshold, we offer several...

Using the exogenous shock of the COVID-19 pandemic, we study how informed market participants evaluate fiscal space. Short-selling activity shifted upon the onset of the pandemic towards companies with low financial flexibility only in countries with limited fiscal space. Among these companies,...

We analyse sub-custodian chains using a unique data set from a survey. Our key question is whether there is any evidence for moral hazard in the delegation of asset safe-keeping to sub-custodians. Sub-custodian chains can be relatively long and frequently reach across several countries. The risk...

Since 2002 the German government seeks to stimulate private retirement savings by means of special allowances and tax exemptions - the so-called Riester scheme. We apply matching and panel regression techniques to assess the impact of the Riester scheme on households' propensities to save in a...

We empirically investigate the distributional consequences of the Riester scheme, the main private pension subsidization program in Germany. We find that 38% of the aggregate subsidy accrues to the top two deciles of the population, but only 7.3% to the bottom two. Nonetheless the Riester scheme...