Acknowledging the fact that the growth experience of countries is seldom well described by the average growth rate, this paper aims at identifying countries that are similar in terms of their growth process, thus emphasizing the dynamics of growth rates. To that end, the growth experience of...

During the global financial crisis, stressed market conditions led to skyrocketing corporate bond spreads that could not be explained by conventional modeling approaches. This paper builds on this observation and sheds light on time-variations in the relationship between systematic risk factors...

This paper studies the behavior of corporate bond spreads during different market regimes between 2004 and 2016. Applying a Markov-switching vector autoregressive (MS-VAR) model, we document that the dynamic impact of spread determinants varies substantially with market conditions. In periods of...

We study the impact of the interaction between fiscal and monetary policy on the low-frequency relationship between the fiscal stance and inflation using crosscountry data from 1965 to 1999. In a first step, we contrast the monetary-fiscal narrative for Germany, the U.S. and Italy with evidence...

Cogan et al. (2009, 2010) claim that the stimulus package passed by the United States Congress in February 2009 had a multiplier far below one. However, the stimulus ́multiplier strongly depends on the assumed monetary policy response. Based on official statements from the Fed chairman, the...

We investigate German banks' exposure to interest rate risk. In finance, higher demand for a risky asset is typically associated with higher expected return. However, employing a utility function which implies both risk-averse and risk-seeking behavior depending on the level of profits, we show...