Owner-occupied housing costs represent an important expenditure for households and should be included in the Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices. Conceptual and practical challenges must be resolved before this can be implemented. Estimates suggest that these costs would have a small impact on monetary policy. At the same time, different degrees of home ownership in the euro area mean that their inclusion ...
Policy rate cuts in negative territory have increased credit supply and improved the macroeconomic environment similar to cuts in positive territory. Dreaded disruptions to the monetary policy transmission channels as well as adverse side effects on bank profitability have so far largely failed to materialise. Thus, the evidence available today shows that the negative interest rate policy is an effective ...
The European Union has put in place an extraordinary array of policy measures to mitigate the devastating economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. The sheer amount and extent of the support economic lifelines makes a rushed termination of policies potentially subject to dire cliff effects. Avoiding these cliff effects requires a combination of decisive and long-lasting fiscal stimuli with an ...
What are the long-term economic effects of a more equal distribution of wealth? We exploit variation in historical inheritance rules for land traversing political, linguistic, geological, and religious borders in Germany. In some German areas, inherited land was to be shared or divided equally among children, while in others land was ruled to be indivisible. Using a geographic regression discontinuity ...
Given its central role in public accountability and in the formation of expectations, it is important to reflect on ways to improve the ECB’s communication policy. Communication should not generally strive for maximum transparency. The optimum degree of transparency varies between different aspects of monetary policy and banking supervision. Although the ECB already communicates very openly with the ...
To finance resolution funds, the regulatory toolkit has been expanded in many countries by bank levies. In addition, these levies are often designed to reduce incentives for banks to rely excessively on wholesale funding resulting in high leverage ratios. At the same time, corporate income taxation biases banks’ capital structure towards debt financing in light of the deductibility of interest on debt. ...
We estimate the dynamic effects of government spending shocks, using time-varying volatility in US data modeled through a Markov switching process. We find that the average government spending multiplier is significantly and persistently above one, driven by a crowding-in of private consumption and non-residential investment. We rationalize the results empirically through a contemporaneously countercyclical ...
Regulatory bank levies set incentives for banks to reduce leverage. At the same time, corporate income taxation makes funding through debt more attractive. In this paper, we explore how regulatory levies affect bank capital structure, depending on corporate income taxation. Based on bank balance sheet data from 2006 to 2014 for a panel of EU-banks, our analysis yields three main results: The introduction ...
