Topic Business Cycles

Inflation is pushing real construction volume into negative territory

Construction Boom Coming to an End; Change in Policy Strategy Needed

Following the construction boom of recent years in Germany, inflation and supply bottlenecks hit the industry hard in 2022. While nominal construction volume increased by nearly 14 percent, it decreased by two percent when adjusted for inflation. Residential construction, which is urgently needed, was particularly affected. In 2023 and 2024, it is expected that investors will show restraint and that ...

A Lasting Crisis Affects R&D Decisions of Smaller Firms: The Greek Experience

We use the prolonged Greek crisis as a case study to understand how a lasting economic shock affects the innovation strategies of firms in economies with moderate innovation activities. Adopting the 3-stage CDM model, we explore the link between R&D, innovation, and productivity for different size groups of Greek manufacturing firms during the prolonged crisis. At the first stage, we find that the ...

Inequality over the Business Cycle: The Role of Distributive Shocks

This paper examines how wealth and income inequality dynamics are related to fluctuations in the functional income distribution over the business cycle. In a panel estimation for OECD countries between 1970 and 2016, although inequality is, on average countercyclical and significantly associated with the capital share, one-third of the countries display a pro- or noncyclical relationship. To analyze ...

The EU Sustainable Finance Taxonomy and Its Contribution to Climate Neutrality

The EU Taxonomy is the first standardised and comprehensive classification system for sustainable economic activities. It covers activities responsible for up to 80% of EU greenhouse gas emissions and may play an important role in channelling investments into low-carbon technologies by helping investors to make informed decisions. However, especially in transition sectors much depends on the stringency ...

The Energy-Price Channel of (European) Monetary Policy

This study examines whether central banks can combat inflation that is caused by rising energy prices. By using a high-frequency event study and a Structural Vector Autoregression, we find evidence that the European Central Bank (ECB) and the Federal Reserve (Fed) are capable of doing so by affecting domestic and global energy prices. This “energy-price channel” of monetary policy plays an important ...

Do Rent Controls and Other Tenancy Regulations Affect New Construction? Some Answers from Long-Run Historical Evidence

Insolvency Regimes and Cross-Border Investment Decisions

This paper investigates the effect of insolvency regulation reforms on cross-border debt and equity investments at aggregate and sectoral levels. Using disaggregated data from the ECB’s Securities Holdings Statistics by Sector (SHSS) database and the OECD indicators on efficiency of insolvency regulations, we find that investors increase their debt and equity holdings in the countries that undertook ...

Crisis Stress for the Diversity of Financial Portfolios - Evidence from European Households

In this paper, we investigate how European households changed the diversity of their financial portfolios in response to the Great Financial and the subsequent European Debt Crisis. For this purpose we apply a Difference-in-Differences (DiD) approach estimated as a correlated random effects (CRE) model to six waves of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). We find that households ...

Estimating Nonlinear Heterogeneous Agents Models with Neural Networks