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.

Staatliche Banken in Deutschland verfolgen einen lokalen Entwicklungsauftrag in ihrer jeweiligen Gemeinde. Da sie dem Staat gehören, sind sie jedoch politischem Einfluss ausgesetzt. Dies birgt das Risiko, dass eine politisierte Mittelvergabe den Entwicklungsauftrag beeinträchtigt. Dennoch ist erstaunlich wenig darüber bekannt, ob die Kreditvergabe durch Banken in staatlichem Besitz in erster Linie dem Ziel der Entwicklung der Region oder einem politischen Ziel dient. In diesem Beitrag wird untersucht, wie sich ein Wechsel der Regierungspartei auf Landesebene auf die Kreditvergabe durch Sparkassen an die Landesregierung in Deutschland zwischen 1992 und 2018 ausgewirkt hat. Die Schätzergebnisse bestätigen: Lokale Sparkassen erhöhen nach einem wahlbedingten Wechsel der Regierungspartei die Kreditvergabe an die Landesregierung – auf Kosten der Kreditvergabe an lokale Haushalte. Ein Regierungswechsel kann also die Indienstnahme der Sparkassen für landespolitische Ziele aktivieren und möglicherweise ihren öffentlichen Auftrag zur lokalen Entwicklung beeinträchtigen.

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.

This paper provides both theoretical and empirical analyses of the differences between BigTech lenders and traditional banks in response to monetary policy changes. Our model integrates Knightian uncertainty into portfolio selection and posits that BigTech lenders possess a diminishing informational advantage with increasing firm size, resulting in reduced ambiguity when lending to smaller firms. The model suggests that the key distinction between BigTech lenders and traditional banks in response to shifts in funding costs, triggered by monetary policy changes, is more evident at the extensive margin rather than the intensive margin, particularly during periods of easing monetary policy. Using a micro-level dataset of small business loans from both types of lenders, we provide empirical support for our theoretical propositions. Our results show that BigTech lenders are more responsive in establishing new lending relationships in an easing monetary policy environment, while the differences in loan amounts are not statistically significant. We also discuss other loan terms and the implications of regulatory policies.

The authors provide a comprehensive overview of codetermination, that is, worker representation in firms’ governance and management. The available micro evidence points to zero or small positive effects of codetermination on worker and firm outcomes and leaves room for moderate positive effects on productivity, wages, and job stability. The authors also present new country-level, general-equilibrium event studies of codetermination reforms between the 1960s and 2010s, finding no effects on aggregate economic outcomes or the quality of industrial relations. They offer three explanations for the institution’s limited impact. First, existing codetermination laws convey little authority to workers. Second, countries with codetermination laws have high baseline levels of informal worker voice. Third, codetermination laws may interact with other labor market institutions, such as union representation and collective bargaining. The article closes with a discussion of the implications for recent codetermination proposals in the United States.

We present causal evidence on the effect of boardroom networks on firm value and compensation policies. We exploit a ban on interlocking directorates of Italian financial and insurance companies as exogenous variation and show that firms that lose centrality in the network experience negative abnormal returns around the announcement date. The key driver of our results is the role of boardroom connections in reducing asymmetric information. The complementarities with the input-output and cross-ownership networks are consistent with this channel. Using hand-collected data, we also show that network centrality has a positive effect on directors’ compensation, providing evidence of rent sharing.

Prognosemodelle für die zukünftige wirtschaftliche Entwicklung verwenden häufig marktbasierte Indikatoren wie Spreads von Unternehmensanleihen, die den Risikoaufschlag gegenüber einem Referenzzins angeben. Anleihespreads bilden jedoch nur die Entwicklung von Risiken für Unternehmen ab, die regelmäßig Anleihen emittieren – im Durchschnitt größere, sichere Firmen. Neuartige Daten zu Bankkrediten, die im Sekundärmarkt gehandelt werden, erlauben auch die Konstruktion von Kreditspreads. Kreditmarktdaten umfassen ein breiteres Spektrum an Firmen, inklusive kleinerer Firmen, die stärker von Finanzmarktfriktionen betroffen sind. Tests zeigen, dass Kreditspreads tatsächlich mehr Informationen über wirtschaftliche Entwicklungen beinhalten als Anleihespreads und daher das Potenzial haben, Prognosemodelle zu verbessern.

We observe that public firms are more likely to issue seasoned stocks rather than bonds when theirs boards are more socially-connected. These connected issuers experience better announcement-period stock returns and attract more institutional investors. This social-connection effect is stronger for firms with severe information asymmetry, higher risk of being undersubscribed, and more visible to investors. Our conjecture is this social-network effect is driven by trust in issuing firms. Given stocks are more sensitive to trust, these trusted firms are more likely to issue stocks than bonds. Trustworthiness plays an important role in firms’ security issuances in capital markets.

We examine how firms adapt their organization when they go public. To conform with the requirements of public capital markets, we expect IPO firms to become more organized, making the firm more accountable and its human capital more easily replaceable. We find that IPO firms transform into a more hierarchical organization with smaller departments. Managerial oversight increases. Organizational functions dedicated to accounting, finance, information and communication, and human resources become much more prominent. Employee turnover is sizeable and directly related to changes in hierarchical layers. New hires are better educated, but younger and less experienced than incumbents, which reflects the staffing needs of a more hierarchical organization. Wage inequality increases as firms become more hierarchical. Overall, going public is associated with a comprehensive transformation of the firm's organization which becomes geared towards efficiently operating a public firm.

The problem of identification is often the core challenge of empirical economic research. The traditional approach to identification is to bring in additional information in the form of identifying assumptions, such as restrictions that certain magnitudes have to be zero. In this paper, we suggest that what are usually thought of as identifying assumptions should more generally be described as information that the analyst had about the economic structure before seeing the data. Such information is most naturally represented as a Bayesian prior distribution over certain features of the economic structure.