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Safe Assets: Krise in den USA, Chance für Deutschland und Europa?Reint GroppCEO.Table, 25. April 2025
This field experiment investigates the causal impact of mothers’ perceptions of gender norms on their employment attitudes and labor-supply expectations. We provide mothers of young children in Germany with information about the prevailing gender norm regarding maternal employment in their city. At baseline, over 70% of mothers incorrectly perceive this gender norm as too conservative – the most pronounced misperception among the various gender norms we examine. Our randomized information treatment improves the accuracy of these perceptions, significantly reducing the share of mothers who perceive gender norms as overly conservative. The treatment also shifts mothers’ own labormarket attitudes in a more liberal direction. Leveraging the fact that we assessed attitudes in a prior survey, we show that specifically the shifted attitude is a strong predictor of mothers’ future labor-market participation. Consistently, treated mothers are more likely to plan an increase in their working hours, particularly those with existing support to facilitate their employment.
Job training is widely regarded as crucial for protecting workers from automation, yet there is a lack of empirical evidence to support this belief. Using internationally harmonized data from over 90,000 workers across 37 industrialized countries, we construct an individual-level measure of automation risk based on tasks performed at work. Our analysis reveals substantial within-occupation variation in automation risk, overlooked by existing occupation-level measures. To assess whether job training mitigates automation risk, we exploit within-occupation and within-industry variation. Additionally, we employ entropy balancing to re-weight workers without job training based on a rich set of background characteristics, including tested numeracy skills as a proxy for unobserved ability. We find that job training reduces workers’ automation risk by 4.7 percentage points, equivalent to 10 percent of the average automation risk. The training-induced reduction in automation risk accounts for one-fifth of the wage returns to job training. Job training is effective in reducing automation risk and increasing wages across nearly all countries, underscoring the external validity of our findings. Women tend to benefit more from training than men, with the advantage becoming particularly pronounced at older ages.
Based on the sufficient statistics approach developed by Huang and Ottaviano (2024), we show how the state of technology of European industries relative to the rest of the world can be empirically assessed in a way that is simple in terms of computation, parsimonious in terms of data requirements, but still comprehensive in terms of information. The lack of systematic cross-industry correlation between export specialization and technological advantage suggests that standard measures of revealed comparative advantage only imperfectly capture a country’s technological prowess due to the concurrent influences of factor prices, market size, markups, firm selection and market share reallocation.
Zur Jahreswende dürfte die weltweite Produktion weiterhin in etwa so schnell wie in der Dekade vor der Pandemie expandieren. Die Konjunktur im Euroraum ist nur verhalten, und die Stagnation der deutschen Wirtschaft setzt sich fort. Die Industrie verliert an internationaler Wettbewerbsfähigkeit. Unternehmen und Verbraucher halten sich aufgrund unklarer wirtschaftspolitischer Aussichten mit ihren Ausgaben zurück. Das Bruttoinlandsprodukt dürfte im Jahr 2024 um 0,2% sinken und im Jahr 2025 um 0,4% expandieren.
Das Produktionspotenzial der deutschen Wirtschaft wächst mittelfristig (2023 bis 2029) mit einer jahresdurchschnittlichen Rate von 0,3% und damit deutlich schwächer als in den Jahren zuvor. Dies ist auf eine ungünstigere Entwicklung aller drei Faktoren (Arbeitsvolumen, Kapitalstock, totale Faktorproduktivität) zurückzuführen. Das potenzielle Wachstum wird insbesondere durch den Rückgang der durchschnittlichen Arbeitszeit gedämpft.
Our results reveal that higher lending spreads between foreign and home markets redirect real estate backed lending towards foreign markets offering a higher interest rate, which provides evidence for "search for yield" behavior. This re-allocation is found especially for banks with more expertise on the foreign market due to a higher local activity and holds for commercial and residential real estate backed loans. Furthermore, "search for yield" behavior and a resulting increase in foreign real estate backed lending is found when macroprudential regulation is missing or misaligned between a bank’s country of residence and the destination country. When turning to the question of whether the detected search for yield behavior results in more risk, we find that especially better capitalized banks report higher forbearance ratios as they might face less stigma effects compared to low capitalized banks.
This field experiment investigates the causal impact of mothers’ perceptions of gender norms on their employment attitudes and labor-supply expectations. We provide mothers of young children in Germany with information about the prevailing gender norm regarding maternal employment in their city. At baseline, over 70% of mothers incorrectly perceive this gender norm as too conservative. Our randomized treatment improves the accuracy of these perceptions, significantly reducing the share of mothers who misperceive gender norms as overly conservative. The treatment also shifts mothers’ own labor-market attitudes towards being more liberal – and we show that specifically the shifted attitude is a strong predictor of mothers’ future labor-market participation. Consistently, treated mothers are significantly more likely to plan an increase in their working hours one year ahead.
The Transition Report 2024-25 focuses on industrial policies in the EBRD regions and beyond. Such policies have seen a resurgence, seeking to address market failures such as environmental degradation. However, their track record is mixed. Their growing popularity is shaped primarily by domestic political economy considerations and rising geopolitical tensions. While industrial policies are typically employed by higher-income economies, they are also now used more frequently in economies with less administrative and fiscal capacity to implement them.
