The determinants of portfolio choice have been studied extensively in the field of household finance. In this paper we study the determinants of the decision to hold risky assets based on a novel dataset of German bank data. Our primary focus is the question whether East Germans di er in their...

In this paper we study the effect of institutional reform on the decision to hold risky assets at the extensive and the intensive margin. We therefore make use of the natural experiment of German Division and Reunification and, based on savings bank customer data from German savings banks, study...

Das BUNDESMINISTERIUM FÜR VERKEHR UND DIGITALE INFRASTRUKTUR arbeitet derzeit an der Aufstellung eines neuen Bundesverkehrswegeplans, der bis zum Jahr 2015 vorgelegt werden soll. Eine wichtige Grundlage hierfür ist eine realistische Vorausschätzung der künftigen Verkehrsentwicklung in...

Im Zuge der deutschen Wiedervereinigung wurden die formalen Institutionen in West- und Ostdeutschland schnell angeglichen. Dies galt insbesondere auch für die Kapitelmärkte. Nach Einrichtung eines Wertpapierdepots konnten nun auch Ostdeutsche risikobehaftete Wertpapiere unterschiedlichster Art...

This paper builds a New Keynesian model with financial frictions and monetary and fiscal rules for the United States. We incorporate a rational bubble process in the (relative) price of capital. Our results show that bubbles account for a significant amount of variance in key macroeconomic...

Econometric forecasting models typically perform bad in volatile environments as they are often present in economies in transition. Since forecasts of key macroeconomic variable are inevitable as guidelines for economic policy, one might alternatively make attempts at measuring market...

Most European economies will experience significant demographic changes in the decades ahead. Due to low birth rates, populations are shrinking and ageing at the same time. This article explores the impact of demographic change on the banking industry. A unique data set, which contains detailed...

Empirical studies analyzing the determinants of U.S. presidential popularity have delivered quite inconclusive results concerning the role of economic variables by assuming linear relationships. We employ penalized spline smoothing in the context of semi-parametric additive mixed models and...

The lack of internationally comparable capital stock data has been a major obstacle to empirical studies of the contribution of the capital stock to economic growth. In this paper, we provide estimations of aggregate capital stocks for 103 countries in 2010. Depending on data availability the...

Im Jahr 2012 stiegen die Verbraucherpreise in Deutschland um 2,1%. Insgesamt sind die Preise seit der Wiedervereinigung im Durchschnitt um 2,0% und seit der Euro-Einführung sogar nur um 1,6% gestiegen. Abgesehen von wenigen Ausnahmen können sich die Deutschen daher über mangelnde...