The globe is still far away from a consistent implementation of a fully-fledged harmonized banking regulatory framework. The reason for this heterogeneity mainly results from (a) historically grown and hence different country-specific traditions in banking regulation and supervision, (b)...

Based on panel data on around 5,500 German household heads originating from four years, this paper analyzes whether the experience of financial losses due to the Corona pandemic has affected three kinds of personal traits and preferences: the willingness to take risks, patience, and the locus of...

The U.S. is often placed within a liberal-utilitarian model and the E.U. is often positioned within a social model. But, rather than adhere to such neat divisions and other binary choices like regulatory models versus voluntarist models such as the corporate social responsibility model, this...

Using a new survey of European households, we study how exogenous variation in the macroeconomic uncertainty perceived by households affects their spending decisions. We use randomized information treatments that provide different types of information about the first and/or second moments of...

Available studies on asymmetries in the monetary transmission mechanism within Europe are invariably based on macro-economic evidence: such evidence is abundant but often contradictory. This paper takes a different route by using micro-economic data. We use the information contained in the...

Germany still has a very generous public pay-as-you-go pension system. It is characterized by early effective retirement ages and very high effective replacement rates. Most workers receive virtually all of their retirement income from this public retirement insurance. Costs are almost 12...

This paper analyzes German monetary policy in the post-Bretton Woods era. Despite the public focus on monetary targeting, in practice, German monetary policy involves the management of short term interest rates, as it does in the United States. Except during the mid to late 1970s, the Bundesbank...

Although its primary ultimate objective is price stability, the Bundesbank has drawn a distinction between its money-focus strategy and the inflation targeting approach recently adopted by a number of central banks. We show that, holding constant the current forecast of inflation, German...

We present an econometric method for estimating the parameters of a diffusion model from discretely sampled data. The estimator is transparent, adaptive, and inherits the asymptotic properties of the generally unattainable maximum likelihood estimator. We use this method to estimate a new...

A low carbon electricity generating technology can only contribute to the net-zero energy transition if it is able to scale up. From that perspective, we compare nuclear, wind and solar power wrt. the size of a typical power plant, across the criteria of physical scalability, building experience...