Anfang September wählt Sachsen-Anhalt einen neuen Landtag, und die AfD hat erstmals die Chance auf eine eigene Regierungsmehrheit. Sachsen-Anhalt hat eine der ältesten Beschäftigtenstrukturen Deutschlands: Fast jeder dritte deutsche Beschäftigte ist 55 oder älter. Im vergangenen Jahrzehnt hat das Land netto bereits 40.580 deutsche Beschäftigte verloren. Die Beschäftigung blieb dennoch stabil, weil 51.960 ausländische Beschäftigte hinzukamen. Ein erheblicher Teil dieses Zuwachses stammt aus Fluchtkontexten: Seit Ende 2020 kamen rund 40% des Zuwachses aus Asylherkunftsländern und der Ukraine. Die internationale Evidenz zeigt nach Regierungswechseln zu zuwanderungskritischen Parteien Rückgänge des ausländischen Zuzugs zwischen 32 und 65%. Eine kompensierende Rückkehr Einheimischer ist nicht zu beobachten. Die Analyse zeigt, dass tausende von offenen Stellen in Sachsen-Anhalt nicht besetzt werden könnten, mit entsprechenden Auswirkungen auf Wohlstand und Wachstum.

We show that online listing prices closely approximate transaction prices across Europe. Our validation uses the IWH European Real Estate Index (EREI), a near-real-time database of monthly purchase prices, rents, listing counts, and time on market for 1,154 NUTS-3 regions in 16 countries since April 2024. With publication lags as short as one month, validated listing prices offer a timely, comparable complement to official house price statistics. Purchase price levels correlate between 0.94 and 0.97 with transaction prices in the five most populous markets, while calibration slopes range from 0.95 to 1.00. Aggregate listing prices exceed benchmark transaction prices by 13% to 22%.

Exploiting the executive compensation reform for state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in China that enforce strict pay restrictions, this study examines whether and how pay restrictions affect firms’ labor investment inefficiency. We find that SOEs experience a decrease in abnormal labor investment following the reform relative to non-SOEs, particularly in over-investment in labor. Our results show that the reform is associated with lower labor investment inefficiency through strengthened internal governance and mitigated internal social comparison. In addition, pay restrictions specifically curb firms’ tendency to over-hire. Further analysis reveals that imposing pay restrictions on executives enhances labor quality and also promotes employee well-being. This study offers novel policy insights by showing how pay restrictions to SOE executives can reduce vertical agency costs and investment inefficiency and enhance workforce quality and well-being in weak institutional environments.

We revisit the employer size wage effect (ESWE) – arguably the most basic and influential departure from the law of one price for labor. Our main result is that this canonical fact disappears completely across establishments within the same firm, even though they operate in different local labor markets. We uncover and dissect this fact by including a firm fixed effect in otherwise standard cross-sectional regressions of wages on establishment size. We implement this demanding specification in population-wide triple-linked firm-establishment-employee data in Germany. This result is new in the ESWE literature (for which our paper also provides the first systematic meta-analysis). This wage-size decoupling is hard to square with the view that employment is determined along a finitely elastic employerspecific labor supply curve – i.e., employers pay exactly the minimum needed for the quantity of labor, but no more – the foundation of the monopsony view. By contrast, large multi-establishment firms (MEF) appear to hire off their labor supply curves (or those curves are very elastic), pay wage premia above the monopsonistic minimum, and leave excess labor supply. We find some evidence for a reemergence of the ESWE within low-premium MEFs. Overall, at least for the 25% of German employment in large firms for which the ESWE disappears, wage setting and employment determination may be better accounted for by alternative models, namely accommodating above-market-clearing wage premia and rationing of labor supply, such as efficiency wage theories.

We investigate the relationship between county-level social capital in the U.S. and asymmetric earnings timeliness (accounting conservatism). We measure social capital by the strength of civic norms and the density of social networks in a community. We find that firms headquartered in regions with higher social capital have earnings that reflect bad news more quickly than good news. Two potential mechanisms driving this connection are evident in our findings. First, the positive link between social capital and asymmetric earnings timeliness is more pronounced in firms with weaker external oversight, suggesting that social capital compensates for weaknesses in these mechanisms by discouraging managers from delaying the recognition of bad news. Second, we illustrate that firms in high social capital regions are more likely to recruit senior executives with higher asymmetric earnings timeliness coefficients. This result implies a preference for managers who adopt more conservative accounting practices. We find similar results using an international sample of firms from 21 countries. Our findings offer new insights into how local social norms influence corporate financial reporting.

We study how idiosyncratic income risk shapes the aggregate and distributional effects of labor and capital income taxation in dynamic general equilibrium models. To this end, we compare a heterogeneous-agent (HA) model with uninsurable idiosyncratic labor productivity risk and a ten-representative-agent (TE) model in which households correspond to fixed wealth deciles without such risk. At the aggregate level, both models generate qualitatively similar responses; however, the HA model exhibits a smaller recessionary impact driven by precautionary savings behavior, which stabilizes investment. At the distributional level, the models differ sharply. In the HA framework, tax shocks trigger endogenous mobility across wealth deciles. These inter-decile transition dynamics tend to benefit lower deciles. In contrast, the TA model features fixed household positions. Our findings highlight that while simpler multi-representative-agent models can approximate aggregate dynamics well, they may miss important distributional adjustment channels. The relevance of these mechanisms ultimately depends on the empirical importance of mobility across the wealth distribution, pointing to a key trade-off between model simplicity and accuracy.

We revisit the employer size wage effect (ESWE)—arguably the most basic and influential departure from the law of one price for labor. Our main result is that this canonical fact disappears completely across establishments within the same firm, even though they operate in different local labor markets. We uncover and dissect this fact by including a firm fixed effect in otherwise standard cross-sectional regressions of wages on establishment size. We implement this demanding specification in population-wide triple-linked firm-establishment-employee data in Germany. This result is new in the ESWE literature (for which our paper also provides the first systematic meta-analysis). This wage-size decoupling is hard to square with the view that employment is determined along a finitely elastic employer-specific labor supply curve—i.e., employers pay exactly the minimum needed for the quantity of labor, but no more—the foundation of the monopsony view. By contrast, large multi-establishment firms (MEF) appear to hire off their labor supply curves (or those curves are very elastic), pay wage premia above the monopsonistic minimum, and leave excess labor supply. We find some evidence for a reemergence of the ESWE within low-premium MEFs. Overall, at least for the 25% of German employment in large firms for which the ESWE disappears, wage setting and employment determination may be better accounted for by alternative models, namely accommodating above-market-clearing wage premia and rationing of labor supply, such as efficiency wage theories.

Forecasts that minimize mean squared forecast error (MSE) often exhibit excessive volatility, limiting their practical applicability. We address this accuracy-smoothness trade-off by introducing a Multivariate Smooth Sign Accuracy (M-SSA) framework, which extracts smoothed components from leading indicators to enhance the signal-to-noise ratio and control the forecast volatility and timing. Applied to quarterly German GDP growth, our method yields smoothed forecasts that can improve forecasting accuracy, particularly over medium-term horizons. We find that while smoother forecasts tend to lag slightly around turning points, this can be offset by adjusting the forecast horizon. These findings highlight the practicality of the M-SSA framework for both forecasters and policymakers, especially in settings where forecast revisions or policy adjustments are costly.

Im September 2025 reisten Finanzökonomen aus aller Welt zum elften Mal nach Halle, um am jährlichen FIN-FIRE-Workshop am IWH teilzunehmen. Zwei Tage lang gaben die Autoren von zehn Beiträgen einen umfassenden Überblick über aktuelle Themen, die potenzielle Herausforderungen für das Finanzsystem darstellen, z. B. mangelnden Datenschutz bei der Vergabe von Immobilienkrediten, Unsicherheiten in Anleihemärkten aufgrund von Klimarisiken, Intransparenz bei synthetischen Risikotransferprodukten, die Auswirkungen geopolitischer Risiken auf die Kreditvergabe sowie granulare Friktionen bei der Transmission geldpolitischer Maßnahmen. Ein intensiver Gedankenaustausch zwischen Autoren, Ko-Referenten und Plenum führte zu neuen Erkenntnissen über die Widerstandsfähigkeit und Fragilität unserer Finanzsysteme.