The crisis on international financial markets that started in 2007 has shown the potential links between the financial sector and the real economy. Exports and foreign direct investment (FDI) have declined, presumably not only because of a lack of demand, but also because of restricted access of...

Does the mere presence of big banks affect macroeconomic outcomes? Gabaix (2011) shows that idosyncratic shocks can have aggregate effects if the distribution of firm sizes in manufacturing follows a power law distribution. Our contribution is two-fold. First, we expand the theory of granularity...

We develop an insurance market model where consumers (i) exhibit present-biased preferences, and (ii) suffer from physical pain in case of (health-) damage. They can exert preventive effort to reduce the probability of damage. Sophisticated consumers correctly anticipate their effort and...

In this paper we measure knowledge spillovers arising from venture-capital nanced companies on the patenting activities of other companies and com- pare them to spillovers from established rms. We develop a novel measure to to identify the appropriate spillover pool based on backward citations...

How large is the impact of intellectual property on cumulative innovation in electronics, computers and communications? Following an antitrust lawsuit against Western Electric and AT&T, Bell Labs had to license all patents published by 1956 for free. We find that this removal of patent rights...

We develop a new measure of uncertainty derived from bank-level data. We apply the measure of firm-level uncertainty developed by Bloom and others (2012) to banking. Uncertainty is measured as the cross-sectional dispersion of shocks to banking-sector specific variables. We then analyze how...

Mitigating the negative externalities that systemic risk can create for the financial system is the goal of macroprudential supervision. In Europe, macroprudential supervision is conducted both, at the national and at the European level. In principle, national regulators are responsible for...

The interplay between banks and the macroeconomy is of key importance for financial and economic stability. We analyze this link using a Factor Augmented Vector Autoregressive Model (FAVAR) which extends a standard VAR for the U.S. macroeconomy with a set of factors summarizing conditions in the...

Modern trade theory emphasizes firm-level productivity differentials to explain the cross-border activities of non-financial firms. This paper tests whether a productivity pecking order also determines international banking activities. We use a novel dataset of all German banks' international...