Competition in the U.S. appears to have declined. One contributing factor may have been heterogeneity in the availability of credit during the financial crisis. I examine the impact of product market peer credit constraints on long-run competitive outcomes and behavior among non-financial firms. I use measures of lender exposure to the financial crisis to create a plausibly exogenous instrument for product market credit availability. I find that credit constraints of product market peers positively predict growth in sales, market share, profitability, and markups. This is consistent with the notion that firms gained at the expense of their credit constrained peers. The relationship is robust to accounting for other sources of inter-firm spillovers, namely credit access of technology network and supply chain peers. Further, I find evidence of strategic investment, i.e. the idea that firms increase investment in response to peer credit constraints to commit to deter entry mobility. This behavior may explain why temporary heterogeneity in the availability of credit appears to have resulted in a persistent redistribution of output across firms.

Nach dem Zusammenbruch der zahlungsunfähigen US-amerikanischen Silicon Valley Bank zieht Reint Gropp, Präsident des Leibniz-Instituts für Wirtschaftsforschung Halle (IWH), drei Lehren für die europäische Bankenaufsicht.

Real estate markets are pivotal to financial stability given their dual role as the underlying asset of crucial financial products in financial systems, such as mortgage loans and asset-backed securities, and the primary source of household wealth alike. As such, they also play traditionally a crucial role for the transmission of monetary policy. Imbalances and sudden corrections in real estate markets have been the root cause of many financial crises over the last decades. But whereas some national, often survey-based indicators of real estate prices are provided by central banks and statistical offices, a comprehensive collection of purchase prices, rents, and proxies for the liquidity of European real estate markets is lacking. The IWH European Real Estate Index (EREI) seeks to fill this void for residential property. This technical report describes the gathering and processing of sale and rental prices for properties in 18 European countries. We provide the general scrapeing step in the section before describing country-specific details for each country in separated sub-sections.

We use a new database on European real estate purchase and rental prices – the IWH European Real Estate Index – to document the relationship between staggered COVID-19 dynamics and real estate prices in 14 EU countries between January 2020 and December 2021. For most countries, we find no statistically significant response of monthly purchase and rental prices due to an increase of regional COVID-19 cases. For the UK we find that more COVID-19 cases depressed both purchase and rental prices significantly, but the economic magnitude of effects was mild during this sample period. In contrast, rents in Italy increased in response to hiking COVID-19 cases, illustrating the importance to consider heterogeneous crisis patterns across the EU when designing policies. Overall, COVID-19 dynamics did not affect real estate values significantly during the pandemic, thereby mitigating potential financial stability concerns via a mortgage lending channel at the time.

Asset prices are a valuable source of information about financial market participants' expectations about key macroeconomic variables. However, the presence of time-varying risk premia requires an adjustment of market prices to obtain the market's rational assessment of future price and policy developments. This paper reviews empirical approaches for recovering market-based expectations. It starts by laying out the two canonical modeling frameworks that form the backbone for estimating risk premia and highlights the proliferation of risk pricing factors that result in a wide range of different asset-price-based expectation measures. It then describes a key methodological innovation to evaluate the empirical plausibility of risk premium estimates and to identify the most accurate market-based expectation measure. The usefulness of this general approach is illustrated for price expectations in the global oil market. Then, the paper provides an overview of the body of empirical evidence for monetary policy and inflation expectations with a special emphasis on market-specific characteristics that complicate the quest for the best possible market-based expectation measure. Finally, it discusses a number of economic applications where market expectations play a key role for evaluating economic models, guiding policy analysis, and deriving shock measures.

We use granular project-level information for the largest regional economic development program in German history to study whether government subsidies to firms affect the quantity and quality of bank lending. We combine the universe of recipient firms under the Improvement of Regional Economic Structures program (GRW) with their local banks during 1998-2019. The modalities of GRW subsidies to firms are determined at the EU level. Therefore, we use it to identify bank outcomes. Banks with relationships to more subsidized firms exhibit higher lending volumes without any significant differences in bank stability. Subsidized firms, in turn, borrow more indicating that banks facilitate regional economic development policies.

In 2015, the European Commission adopted the Capital Markets Union (CMU) action plan. The plan aims to deepen financial integration and harmonize international standards for investments within the European Union (EU) and it outlines several actions to be implemented in order to address twelve key priority areas. We assemble a database of the legislative acts that implement the CMU. The dataset includes a list of directives and regulations at the EU level with information on publication, entry into force, and transposition dates as well as brief descriptions. This information might be useful in empirical analyses assessing the effectiveness of components of the CMU.

We investigate the French 2012 financial transaction tax (FTT) and find robust evidence for anticipation effects before the implementation date. Controlling for short-run effects, we only find weak evidence for a long-run reduction in trading activity. Thus, the main impact of the French FTT on trading activity is short-run. In line with liquidity clientele effects, we find a more potent effect for low-liquidity stocks and a reallocation of trading to high-liquidity stocks from the Supplemental Liquidity Provider (SLP) program. Finally, we find weak evidence for a persistent volatility reduction but no indication of a significant FTT impact on price efficiency.

This paper investigates whether managers’ personal connections help corporate productivity to recover after a negative economic shock. Leveraging the heterogeneity in the severity of the financial crisis across different sectors, the paper reports that (i) the financial crisis had a negative effect on within-firm productivity, (ii) the effect was long-lasting and persistent, supporting a productivity-hysteresis hypothesis, and (iii) managers’ personal connections allowed corporations to recover from this productivity slowdown. Among the possible mechanisms, we show that connected managers operating in affected sectors foster productivity recovery through higher input cost efficiency and better access to the credit market, as well as more efficient use of labour and capital.

The economy is a complex system because market participants do not act independently but adjust their behavior to other agents and to the outcome which emerges from their joint actions (Arthur, 2014). Dependencies among participants can impede policy makers capabilities to influence or steer the course of the economy. Kambhu et al. (2007) argue that to influence developments in financial markets, for instance to prevent crises from spreading, there are only “coarse or indirect options” available for policy makers. Similar to crises which propagate through a complex system, interventions might result in unintended side effects which can also disseminate through the system. Thus, in a complex system, unintended consequences of policy efforts may well be the rule. Policy makers try to ward off or mitigate negative consequences for the economy and society during periods of crisis. For instance, during the Covid crisis large scale support programs for firms in Western economies were set up to avoid bankruptcies. Similarly, during the sovereign debt crisis in the Eurozone, the European Central Bank (ECB) set up large scale asset purchase programs as well as additionally longer-term refinancing operations (LTRO) which provided immediate support to financial market participants’ liquidity positions and thereby prevented a melt-down of the financial system. During these periods, immediate and abundant liquidity supply is of utmost importance. Meanwhile, crisis measures, due to their massive scale and non-specific target group, may entail unknown or unintended side effects for instance on competition among market participants, firms’ investment behavior, or changes in lending strategies and risk taking behavior of banks. Likewise, new regulatory frameworks such as the introduction of new markets can have consequences previously not thought of. For policy makers it is important to know direct effects of policy interventions but also to be aware of the possibility and impact of indirect or unexpected side effects in order to evaluate measures taken and to learn for future design of regulation or intervention.