This paper provides empirical evidence of interregional risk sharing in reunified Germany. The focus is on two related questions: First, to what extent do private institutions and the public sector provide insurance against asymmetric shocks to individual regions? Second, to what extent does the...

This paper questions unconventional fiscal policy effects when the monetary policy rate is at the zero lower bound. We provide evidence for the US that the spread between the policy rate and the US-LIBOR, which is more relevant for private sector transactions, increases with government...

This paper examines the pricing of public debt in a quantitative macroeconomic model with government default risk. Default may occur due to a fiscal policy that does not preclude a Ponzi game. When a build-up of public debt makes this outcome inevitable, households stop lending such that the...

This paper examines fiscal policy without commitment and the effects of conditional bailout loans. The government relies on distortionary taxation and decides between full debt repayment and costly default. It tends to overborrow due to myopia, which induces default to be a relevant policy...

In recessions, predominantly men lose their jobs, which has given rise to the term "man-cessions". We analyze whether fiscal expansions bring men back into jobs. To do so, we estimate vector-autoregressive models and identify the effects of fiscal shocks and non-fiscal shocks on the gender...

The COVID-19 pandemic forced much of the world to adapt suddenly to severe restrictions. In this study, we attempt to quantify the impact of the pandemic on student performance in higher education. To collect data on important covariates, we conducted a survey among first-year students of...