How have credit markets evolved in the long-run around the world? I present evidence based on a novel sectorally disaggregated dataset on credit to the private sector for 120 countries for 1940-2014, as well as new series on total credit going back to 1910. Over the last 50 years, household...

Do politics matter for macroprudential policies? I show that changes in macroprudential regulation exhibit a predictable electoral cycle in the run-up to 221 elections across 58 countries from 2000 through 2014. Policies restricting mortgages and consumer credit are systematically looser before...

What are the costs of congested court systems? This paper studies the 2005 consumer bankruptcy reform, which caused the largest recorded drop in the caseload of bankruptcy courts in the United States. The reform changed the law for individual debtors but left corporate bankruptcies unaffected....

This paper investigates the link between social media and hate crime. We show that anti-refugee sentiment on Facebook predicts crimes against refugees in otherwise similar municipalities with higher social media usage. To establish causality, we exploit exogenous variation in the timing of major...

We evaluate the economic value of business cycle forecasts for potential investors on financial markets as opposed to statistical measures of forecasts accuracy. Taking Germany as an example, and based on annual data ranging from 1990 to 2016 covering 16 institutions and 18 different forecasts,...

How do changes in banking regulation affect the syndicated loan market? Because branch networks and loan syndication both facilitate banks' ability to diversify geographical credit risk, we focus on the Riegle-Neal Interstate Branching and Banking Efficiency Act of 1994. We investigate its...

This paper argues that the distribution of the coefficients of the regular continued fraction should be considered for each algebraic number of degree 2 separately. For random numbers the coefficients are distributed by the Gauss-Kuzmin distribution (also called Khinchin's law). We apply the...