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Joint Economic Forecast: From Pandemic to Energy Crisis: Economy and Politics under Permanent Stress

The German economy is steering through difficult waters and faces the highest inflation rates in decades. In their spring report, the leading German economic research institutes revise their outlook for this year significantly downward. The recovery from the COVID-19 crisis is slowing down as a result of the war in Ukraine, but remains on track. The institutes expect GDP to increase by 2.7 and 3.1 ...

Recovery as a springboard for change: Germany and the EU

As the German economy and the EU are emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic, the focus is shifting to questions of long-term transformation. How can we transform our economies while also limiting climate change and preparing for its impact? The pandemic has accelerated digitalization of German firms and many have already invested to deal with climate change. At the same time, concerns about the...

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 ...

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 ...

Brothers in Arms: The Value of Coalitions in Sanctions Regimes

This paper provides novel empirical results on the welfare impact of sanctions when countries coordinate their sanctions packages. To do so, weconduct simulations with the Caliendo and Parro (2015) CGE model of the world economy that provides changes in welfare under different hypothetical setups of sanctions coalitions. Focusing on the 2012 wave of sanctions against Iran and the 2014 sanctions...

DIW Berlin Economic Outlook: Summer Upswing to Follow Winter Slump

The Omicron wave of the coronavirus has impacted economies worldwide, resulting in a bleak winter. Although restrictions on economic and public life have been less severe than at the beginning of 2021 in many places—mainly due to the progress of vaccination campaigns—and there are prospects of easing restrictions in Germany as well, the labor shortage caused by the current rates of infection is noticeable. ...

Ownership Diversification and Product Market Pricing Incentives

We link investor ownership to profit loads on rival firms by the managers of a firm. We propose a theory model in which we distinguish between passive and active investors’ holdings, where passive investors are relatively more diversified. We find that if passive investors become relatively bigger, then common ownership incentives increase. We show that these higher incentives, in turn, are linked ...

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 ...

Addressing Export Concerns in the CBAM File

Brüning’s Austerity Policies of the Early 1930s Intensified the Economic Slump and Increased Unemployment

May 2022 marked the 90th anniversary of the end of Heinrich Brüning’s term as Reich Chancellor. To this day, the economic effects of Brüning’s extreme austerity measures remain unclear. However, new data and calculations have made an initial quantification of the economic consequences of Brüning’s policies possible. An analysis based on a time series model illustrates how the Weimar Republic’s economy ...