The Swiss National Bank abolished the exchange rate floor versus the Euro in January 2015. Based on a synthetic matching framework, we analyse the impact of this unexpected (and therefore exogenous) shock on the stock market. The results reveal a significant level shift (decline) in asset prices in Switzerland following the discontinuation of the minimum exchange rate. While adjustments in stock market returns were most pronounced directly after the news announcement, the variance was elevated for some weeks, indicating signs of increased uncertainty and potentially negative consequences for the real economy.

Reserve requirements, as a tool of macroprudential policy, have been increasingly employed since the outbreak of the great financial crisis. We conduct an analysis of the effect of reserve requirements in tranquil and crisis times on credit and GDP growth making use of Bayesian model averaging methods. In terms of credit growth, we can show that initial negative effects of higher reserve requirements (which are often reported in the literature) tend to be short-lived and turn positive in the longer run. In terms of GDP per capita growth, we find on average a negative but not robust effect of regulation in tranquil times, which is only partly offset by a positive but also not robust effect in crisis times.

This article describes the economic development of Saxony-Anhalt since 1990 in the context of the East German transition from a centrally planned economy to a market economy. In the early 1990s the economy of Saxony-Anhalt caught up quickly with West Germany, mainly because the capital stock was modernized and expanded. Convergence, however, has almost come to a halt for some time now and gross domestic product per employed person is still about 20% below the West German level. The challenge for economic policy is to further the catching-up process by fostering research and innovation and improving the skills of the workforce.

In the coalition agreement from February 7, 2018, the new German federal government drafts its public pension policy, which has to be evaluated against the background of demographic dynamics in Germany. From the year 2020 onwards, the age structure of the German population will change significantly. In this paper, the consequences of public pensions related policy measures from the coalition agreement for the German public pension insurance are illustrated using a simulation model. In the long run, the intended extensions of benefits would lead to an increase in the contribution rate to the German public pension insurance of about two and a half percentage points. Referring to pension systems of other countries, we discuss measures in order to limit this increase in the contribution rate.

In this paper, we investigate to what extent sovereign stress and banking stress have contributed to the increase in the level and in the heterogeneity of non-financial firms’ financing costs in the Euro area during the European debt crisis and how both have affected the monetary transmission mechanism. Employing a large firm-level data set containing two million observations, we are able to identify the effect of government bond yield spreads (sovereign stress) and the share of non-performing loans (banking stress) on firms‘ financing costs in a panel model by assuming that idiosyncratic shocks to individual firms are uncorrelated with country-specific variables. We find that the two sources of stress have increased firms’ financing costs controlling for country and firm-specific factors. Moreover, we estimate both to have significantly impaired the monetary transmission mechanism.