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Studie zeigt Milliardenlücke im AfD-Programm für Sachsen-AnhaltReint GroppHandelsblatt, 6. August 2026
Do economic incentives govern information diffusion in markets? Using international banks’ advisory activities in corporate takeovers as their source of private information, we show in supervisory data that banks with closer ties to the target, but not the acquirer, advisor trade profitably in the target’s stock prior to the deal announcement. This trading behavior is associated with a higher premium paid by the acquirer without compromising the deal success. As the incentives of informed traders are aligned only with those of the target shareholders, which are represented by the target advisor, our evidence suggests strategic information transmission among these banks.
We study the interaction of expansionary rate-based monetary policy and quantitative easing, despite their concurrent implementation, by exploiting heterogeneous banks and the introduction of negative monetary-policy rates in a fragmented euro area. Quantitative easing increases credit supply less, translating into weaker employment growth, when banks’ funding costs do not decrease. Using administrative data from Germany, we uncover that among banks selling their securities, central-bank reserves remain disproportionately with high-deposit banks that are constrained due to sticky customer deposits at the zero lower bound. Affected German banks lend relatively less to firms while increasing their interbank exposure in the euro area.
Externalities and social preferences, such as altruism, play a key role in the choice of social interactions, which in turn affect the diffusion of a pandemic. We build a dynamic epidemiological model with endogenous social interactions in a frictional environment, also in a variant with heterogeneous agents and a network structure. Taking into account agents’ endogenous behavior and altruism generates markedly different predictions relative to a naïve epidemiological model with exogenous contact rates. Congestion and commitment inefficiencies arise, even under full altruism, and call for policy intervention. We derive the efficient allocation, and show how the Ramsey planner can mitigate the respective externalities.
We analyze the effects of a reform of capital regulation for U.S. insurance companies in 2009. The reform eliminates capital buffers against unexpected losses associated with portfolio holdings of MBS, but not for other fixed-income assets. After the reform, insurance companies are much more likely to retain downgraded MBS compared to other downgraded assets. This pattern is more pronounced for financially constrained insurers. Exploiting discontinuities in the reform’s implementation, we can identify the relevance of the capital requirements channel. We also document that the insurance industry crowds outs other investors in the new issuance of (high-yield) MBS.
Social preferences facilitate the internalization of health externalities, for example, by reducing mobility during a pandemic. We test this hypothesis using mobility data from 258 cities worldwide alongside experimentally validated measures of social preferences. Controlling for time-varying heterogeneity that could arise at the level at which mitigation policies are implemented, we find that they matter less in regions that are more altruistic, patient, or exhibit less negative reciprocity. In those regions, mobility falls ahead of lockdowns, and remains low after the lifting thereof. Our results elucidate the importance, independent of the cultural context, of social preferences in fostering cooperative behavior.
In this article, we review the nascent literature on the transmission of negative policy rates. We discuss the theory of how the transmission depends on bank balance sheets, and how this changes once policy rates become negative. We review the growing evidence that negative policy rates are special because the pass-through to banks’ retail deposit rates is hindered by a zero lower bound. We summarize existing research on the impact of negative rates on banks’ lending and securities portfolios as well as their consequences for the real economy. Finally, we discuss the role of different initial conditions when the policy rate becomes negative, and potential interactions between negative policy rates and other unconventional monetary policies.
This paper documents a link between bank concentration and markups in nonfinancial sectors. We exploit concentration-increasing bank mergers and variation in banks’ market shares across industries and show that higher credit concentration is associated with higher markups and that high-market-share lenders charge lower loan rates. We argue that this is due to the greater incidence of competing firms sharing common lenders that induce less aggressive product market behavior among their borrowers, thereby internalizing potential adverse effects of higher rates. Consistent with our conjecture, the effect is stronger in industries with competition in strategic substitutes where negative product market externalities are greatest.
Firms face a trade-off between patenting, thereby disclosing innovation, and secrecy. We show that this trade-off interacts with firms’ financing choices. As a shock to innovation disclosure, we study the American Inventor’s Protection Act that made firms’ patent applications public 18 months after filing, rather than when granted. We find that such increased innovation disclosure helps firms switch lenders, resulting in lower cost of debt, and facilitates their access to syndicated-loan and public capital markets. Our evidence lends support to the idea that public-information provision through patents and private information in financial relationships are substitutes, and that innovation disclosure makes credit markets more contestable.
We show that negative policy rates affect the supply of bank credit in a novel way. Banks are reluctant to pass on negative rates to depositors, which increases the funding cost of high-deposit banks, and reduces their net worth, relative to low-deposit banks. As a consequence, the introduction of negative policy rates by the European Central Bank in mid-2014 leads to more risk-taking and less lending by euro-area banks with a greater reliance on deposit funding. Our results suggest that negative rates are less accommodative and could pose a risk to financial stability, if lending is done by high-deposit banks.
We explore whether lenders’ decisions to provide liquidity in periods of distress are affected by the extent to which they internalize the negative spillovers of industry downturns. We conjecture that high-market-share lenders are more likely to internalize negative spillovers and show that they provide liquidity to industries in distress when fire sales are likely to ensue. High-market-share lenders also provide liquidity to customers and suppliers of distressed industries when the disruption of supply chains is expected to be costly. Our results suggest a novel channel to explain why credit concentration may favor financial stability.
