On November 8, 2013, several members of the British House of Lords' Subcommittee A conducted a hearing at the ECB in Frankfurt, Germany, on "Genuine Economic and Monetary Union and its Implications for the UK". Professors Otmar Issing and Jan Pieter Krahnen were called as expert witnesses. The...

The European Commission has published a Green Paper outlining possible measures to create a single market for capital in Europe. Our comments on the Commission's capital markets union project use the functional finance approach as a starting point. Policy decisions, according to the functional...

The European Commission has published a Green Paper outlining possible measures to create a single market for capital in Europe. Our comments on the Commission's capital markets union project use the functional finance approach as a starting point. Policy decisions, according to the functional...

In a contribution prepared for the Athens Symposium on 'Banking Union, Monetary Policy and Economic Growth', Otmar Issing describes forward guidance by central banks as the culmination of the idea of guiding expectations by pure communication. In practice, he argues, forward guidance has proved...

The financial crisis which started in 2007 has caused a tremendous challenge for monetary policy. The simple concept of inflation targeting has lost its position as state of the art. There is a debate on whether the mandate of a central bank should not be widened. And, indeed, monetary policy...

In the wake of the Global Financial Crisis that started in 2007, policymakers were forced to respond quickly and forcefully to a recession caused not by short-term factors, but rather by an over-accumulation of debt by sovereigns, banks, and households: a so-called balance sheet recession....

Zum ersten Mal wurde in Deutschland eine groß angelegte wissenschaftliche Studie zur Machbarkeit und zum Nutzen einer säulenübergreifenden Renteninformationsplattform durchgeführt, unter realen Bedingungen und mit mehreren tausend Teilnehmern. Die beiden zentralen Ergebnisse sind, dass ein...

We educate investors with significant dividend holdings about the benefits of dividend reinvestment and the costs of misperceiving dividends as additional, free income. The intervention increases planned dividend reinvestment in survey responses. Using trading records, we observe a corresponding...

Cryptocurrencies have received growing attention from individuals, the media, and regulators. However, little is known about the investors whom these financial instruments attract. Using administrative data, we describe the investment behavior of individuals who invest in cryptocurrencies with...

This paper studies why investors buy dividend-paying assets and how they time their consumption accordingly. We combine administrative bank data linking customers' consumption transactions and income to detailed portfolio data and survey responses on financial behavior. We find that private...