Recent empirical evidence suggests that US industrial firms invest heavily in noncash, risky financial assets. Using hand-collected data on financial portfolios of German firms, we show that risky asset holdings are not an anomaly unique to the US. We find that industrial firms in Germany invest...

Unconventional fiscal policy uses announcements of future increases in consumption taxes to generate inflation expectations and accelerate consumption expenditure. It is budget neutral and time consistent. We exploit a unique natural experiment for an empirical test of the effectiveness of...

Unconventional fiscal policy uses announcements of future increases in consumption taxes to generate inflation expectations and accelerate consumption expenditure. It is budget neutral and time consistent. We exploit a unique natural experiment for an empirical test of the effectiveness of...

Unconventional fiscal policy uses announcements of future increases in consumption taxes to generate inflation expectations and accelerate consumption expenditure. It is budget neutral and time consistent. We exploit a unique natural experiment for an empirical test of the effectiveness of...

Unconventional fiscal policy uses announcements of future increases in consumption taxes to generate inflation expectations and accelerate consumption expenditure. It is budget neutral and time consistent. We exploit a unique natural experiment for an empirical test of the effectiveness of...

Unconventional fiscal policy uses announcements of future increases in consumption taxes to generate inflation expectations and accelerate consumption expenditure. We exploit a natural experiment for an empirical test of the effectiveness of unconventional fiscal policy. To comply with European...

Available studies on asymmetries in the monetary transmission mechanism within Europe are invariably based on macro-economic evidence: such evidence is abundant but often contradictory. This paper takes a different route by using micro-economic data. We use the information contained in the...