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Wenn die AfD hier gewinnt, wären die Folgen überall in Deutschland deutlich zu spürenReint GroppDer Spiegel, 8. Januar 2026
This paper provides evidence on the relationship between finance and growth in a fast growing country, such as China. Employing data of 27 Chinese provinces over the period 1995–2003, we study whether the financial development of two different types of financial institutions — banks and non-banks — have a (significantly different) impact on local economic growth. Our findings indicate that banking development shows a statistically significant and economically more pronounced impact on local economic growth.
International bank portfolios constitute a large component of international country portfolios. Yet, banks’ response to international macroeconomic conditions remains largely unexplored.We use a novel dataset on banks’ international portfolios to answer three questions. First, what are the long-run determinants of banks’ international portfolios? Second, how do banks’ international portfolios adjust to short-run macroeconomic developments? Third, does the speed of adjustment change with the degree of financial integration?We find that, in the long-run, market size has a positive impact on foreign assets and liabilities. An increase in the interest differential between the home and the foreign economy lowers foreign assets and increases foreign liabilities. Foreign trade has a positive impact on international bank portfolios, which is independent from the effect of other macroeconomic variables. Short-run dynamics show heterogeneity across countries, but these dynamics can partly be explained with gravity-type variables.
Does more FDI make the world a riskier place for workers? We analyze whether an increase in multinational firms' activities is associated with an increase in firm-level employment volatility. We use a firm-level dataset for Germany which allows us to distinguish between purely domestic firms, exporters, domestic multinationals and foreign multinationals. Employment in multinationals could be more volatile than employment in domestic firms if multinationals were facing more volatile demand or if they react more to aggregate developments. We therefore decompose the labor demand of firms into their reaction and their exposure to aggregate developments. We find no above-average wage and output elasticities for multinational firms.
The paper shows that mispriced deposit insurance and capital regulation were of second-order importance in determining the capital structure of large U.S. and European banks during 1991 to 2004. Instead, standard cross-sectional determinants of non-financial firms’ leverage carry over to banks, except for banks whose capital ratio is close to the regulatory minimum. Consistent with a reduced role of deposit insurance, we document a shift in banks’ liability structure away from deposits towards non-deposit liabilities. We find that unobserved time-invariant bank fixed-effects are ultimately the most important determinant of banks’ capital structures and that banks’ leverage converges to bank specific, time-invariant targets.
We compute optimally diversified international asset portfolios for banks located in France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States using the mean–variance portfolio model with currency hedging. We compare these benchmark portfolios with the actual cross-border asset positions of banks from 1995 to 2003 and ask whether the differences are best explained by regulations, institutions, cultural conditions or other financial frictions. Our results suggest that both culture and regulations affect the probability of a country's being overweighted in banks' portfolios: countries whose residents score higher on a survey measure of trust are more likely to be overweighted, while countries that have tighter capital controls are less likely to be overweighted. From a policy standpoint, the importance of culture suggests a limit to the degree of financial integration that may be achievable by the removal of formal economic barriers.
Recent developments in international financial markets have highlighted the role of banks in the transmission of shocks across borders. We employ dynamic panel methods for a sample of OECD countries to analyze whether banks' foreign assets react to macroeconomic shocks at home and abroad. We find that banks reduce their foreign assets in response to a relative increase in domestic interest rates, and they increase their foreign assets when the growth rate of world energy prices rises. The responses are characterized by a temporal overshooting and a dynamic adjustment process that extends over several quarters.
We use Italian regional data to answer the question whether trade affects within-country income differentials. In Italy, the more affluent Northern regions trade more with the rest of the world than the poorer ones in the Southern “Mezzogiorno” regions. Prima facie, there is a positive correlation between external trade and per capita income. Studying this relationship empirically requires taking into account the endogenous component of trade. We argue that panel cointegration models can complement instrumental variables techniques to account for the endogeneity of trade in a panel context. Both methods show a positive link between trade openness and the level of income per capita.
This paper investigates the driving forces of output change in 77 countries during the period 1970–2000. A flexible modeling strategy is adopted that accounts for (i) the inefficient use of resources, and (ii) different production technologies across countries. The proposed model can identify technical, efficiency, and input change for each of three endogenously determined regimes. Membership in these regimes is estimated, rather than determined ex ante. This framework enables explorations into the determinants of output growth and convergence issues in each regime.
This paper investigates the forces driving output change in a panel of EU manufacturing industries. A flexible modeling strategy is adopted that accounts for: (i) inefficient use of resources and (ii) differences in the production technology across industries. With our model we are able to identify technical, efficiency, and input growth for endogenously determined technology clubs. Technology club membership is modeled as a function of R&D intensity. This framework allows us to explore the components of output growth in each club, technology spillovers and catch-up issues across industries and countries.
Size matters in banking. In this paper, we explore whether shocks originating at large banks affect the probability of distress of smaller banks and thus the stability of the banking system. Our analysis proceeds in two steps. In a first step, we follow Gabaix and construct a measure of idiosyncratic shocks at large banks, the so-called Banking Granular Residual. This measure documents the importance of size effects for the German banking system. In a second step, we incorporate this measure of idiosyncratic shocks at large banks into an integrated stress-testing model for the German banking system following De Graeve et al. (2008). We find that positive shocks at large banks reduce the probability of distress of small banks.
