Negative interest rates remain a controversial policy for central banks. We study a novel signalling channel and ask under what conditions negative rates should exist in an optimal policymaker’s toolkit. We prove two necessary conditions for the optimality of negative rates: a time-consistent policy setting and a preference for policy smoothing. These conditions allow negative rates to signal policy ...
We use machine learning techniques to quantify trade tensions between the United States and China. Our measure matches well-known events in the US-China trade dispute and is exogenous to the developments on global financial markets. Local projections show that rising trade tensions leave US markets largely unaffected, except for firms that are more exposed to China, while negatively impacting stock ...
This paper exploits unique variation induced by two information treatments on a sample of German households in 2017 and 2018 to evaluate how subjective belief formation about stock market returns affects stock market participation and portfolio choice. I find that on average the information treatments do not shift individual expectations about returns significantly. Additionally, I show that...
Common ownership - when an investor holds shares in two or more companies - has recently attracted significant attention from policy-makers and researchers, studying mainly US firms. European firms, however, are different as top investors with large stakes, like governments, founding families and foundations are much more prevalent. This paper takes a well-known common ownership with micro-economic ...
Spillovers from US monetary policy entail spillbacks to the domestic economy. Applying counterfactual analyses in a Bayesian proxy structural vector-autoregressive model we find that spillbacks account for a non-trivial share of the slowdown in domestic real activity following a contractionary US monetary policy shock. Spillbacks materialise as a monetary policy tightening depresses foreign sales and ...
We test for the empirical relevance of partial and asymmetric dominant-currency pricing (DCP), the hypothesis that large but not necessarily identical shares of economies’ export and import prices are sticky in US dollar. We first set up a structural three-country New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model which nests DCP, producer-currency pricing and local-currency pricing. Under ...