This paper shows that politicians' pressure to climb the career ladder increases bank risk exposure in their region. Chinese local politicians are set growth targets in their region that are relative to each other. Growth is stimulated by debt-financed programs which are mainly financed via bank...

Zusammenfassung Wir untersuchen die Eignung von ifo-Geschäftserwartungen und ZEW-Konjunkturerwartungen als Frühindikatoren für die deutsche Industrieproduktion. Anhand von Granger-Kausalitätstests wird gezeigt, dass die auf Umfragen unter Finanzanalysten basierenden ZEW-Konjunkturerwartungen...

This paper examines heterogeneity in exchange rate expectations. Whereas agents' heterogeneity is key in modern exchange rate models, evidence on determinants of heterogeneity is weak so far. Our sample, covering expectations from about 300 forecasters over 15 years, shows remarkable time...

As a group, market forecasters are egregiously overconfident. In conformity to the dynamic model of overconfidence of Gervais and Odean (2001), successful forecasters have become more overconfident. What's more, more experienced forecasters have learned to be overconfident, and hence are more...

Capital markets are - by definition - a fairly new phenomenon for countries that started embracing capitalism a little more than ten years ago. More specifically, the first securities exchanges in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) opened at the beginning of the 1990s and the last had been set up...

This paper extends earlier studies on exchange rate expectations' formation by using new data and adding information about forecasters' reliance on fundamental analysis for the first time. We replicate the conventional result of non rational expectations. Moreover, biases in expectations are...

We apply a relatively novel leading-lagging (LL) method to four leading and one lagging indexes for industrial production (IP) in Germany. We obtain three sets of results. First, we show that the sentiment-based ifo index performs best in predicting the general changes in IP (−0.596, range...

The ZEW Financial Market Survey is a monthly panel survey among financial market experts that was launched in December 1991. The survey focuses on the experts' expectations about international financial markets and macroeconomic developments. We describe the ZEW Financial Market Survey and the...