With this paper we seek to contribute to the literature on the relation between finance and growth. We argue that most studies in the field fail to measure the quality of financial intermediation but rather resort to using proxies on the size of financial systems. Moreover, cross-country...

After the German reunification, interregional subsidies accounted for approximately four percent of gross fixed capital investment in the new federal states. We show that between 1992 and 2005 infrastructure and (small) business aid had a negative net impact on regional economic growth. This...

This paper investigates the returns and flows of German money market funds before and during the liquidity crisis of 2007/2008. The main findings of this paper are: In liquid times money market funds enhanced their returns by investing in less liquid papers. By doing so they outperformed other...

We use a unique and comprehensive data set on open-end real estate funds in Germany to study a liquidity crisis that hit this industry between 2005 and 2006. Since this industry is comparably unregulated our data set permits us to contrast competing explanations of liquidity crisis. We find that...

Political risk represents an important hidden transaction cost that reduces international trade. This paper investigates the claim that German public export credit guarantees (Hermes guarantees) mitigate this friction to trade flows and hence promote exports. We employ an empirical trade gravity...

This paper investigates the returns and flows of German money market funds before and during the liquidity crisis of 2007/2008. The main findings of this paper are: in liquid times, money market funds enhanced their returns by investing in less liquid papers. By doing so they outperformed other...