Projects
Our Projects 07.2022 ‐ 12.2026 Evaluation of the InvKG and the federal STARK programme On behalf of the Federal Ministry of Economics and Climate Protection, the IWH and the RWI…
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DPE Course Programme Archive
DPE Course Programme Archive 2023 2022 2021 2020 2019 2018 2017 2016 2015 2014 2013 2012 2023 Microeconomics several lecturers winter term 2023/2024 (IWH) Econometrics several…
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IWH Retreat Kick-off
IWH Retreat: Kick-off Meeting from Oliver Holtemöller, April 19, 2022 Dear all, On 08 and 09 June 2022, our retreat at Schwielowsee near Potsdam will take place. The motto is…
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05.04.2023 • 9/2023
East German economy has come through energy crisis well so far – Implications of the Joint Economic Forecast Spring 2023 and new data for the East German economy
In 2022, the East German economy expanded by 3.0%, significantly stronger than the economy in West Germany (1.5%). The background is a more robust development of labour and retirement incomes. For 2023, the Halle Institute for Economic Research (IWH) forecasts a higher GDP growth rate of 1% in East Germany than in Germany as a whole (0.3%). The unemployment rate is expected to stagnate, with 6.8% in 2023 and 6.7% in the following year.
Oliver Holtemöller
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Corporate Culture and Firm Value: Evidence from Crisis
Yiwei Fang, Franco Fiordelisi, Iftekhar Hasan, Woon Sau Leung, Gabriel Wong
Journal of Banking and Finance,
January
2023
Abstract
Based on the Competing Values Framework (CVF), we score 10-K text to measure company culture in four types (collaborative, controlling, competitive, and creative) and examine its role in firm stability. We find that firms with higher controlling culture fared significantly better during the 2008–09 crisis. Firms with stronger controlling culture experienced fewer layoffs, less negative asset growth, greater debt issuance, and increased access to credit-line facilities during the crisis. The positive effect of the controlling culture is stronger among the financially-constrained firms. Overall, the controlling culture improves firm stability through greater support from capital providers.
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Financial Linkages and Sectoral Business Cycle Synchronization: Evidence from Europe
Hannes Böhm, Julia Schaumburg, Lena Tonzer
IMF Economic Review,
December
2022
Abstract
We analyze whether financial integration leads to converging or diverging business cycles using a dynamic spatial model. Our model allows for contemporaneous spillovers of shocks to GDP growth between countries that are financially integrated and delivers a scalar measure of the spillover intensity at each point in time. For a financial network of ten European countries from 1996 to 2017, we find that the spillover effects are positive on average and much larger during periods of financial stress, pointing towards stronger business cycle synchronization. Dismantling GDP growth into value added growth of ten major industries, we observe that spillover intensities vary significantly. The findings are robust to a variety of alternative model specifications.
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Bitcoin Flash Crash on May 19, 2021: What Did Really Happen on Binance?
Tim Baumgartner, Andre Guettler
IWH Discussion Papers,
No. 25,
2022
Abstract
Bitcoin plunged by 30% on May 19, 2021. We examine the outage the largest crypto exchange Binance experienced during the crash, when it halted trading for retail clients and stopped providing transaction data. We find evidence that Binance back-filled these missing transactions with data that does not conform to Benford‘s Law. The Bitcoin futures price difference between Binance and other exchanges was seven times larger during the crash period compared to a prior reference period. Data manipulation is a plausible explanation for our findings. These actions are in line with Binance aiming to limit losses for its futures-related insurance fund.
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The Impact of Overconfident Customers on Supplier Firm Risks
Yiwei Fang, Iftekhar Hasan, Chih-Yung Lin, Jiong Sun
Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization,
May
2022
Abstract
Research has shown that firms with overconfident chief executive officers (CEOs) tend to overinvest and are exposed to high risks due to unrealistically optimistic estimates of their firms’ future performance. This study finds evidence that overconfident CEOs also affect suppliers’ risk taking. Specifically, serving overconfident customers can lead to high supplier risks, measured by stock volatility, idiosyncratic risk, and market risk. The effects are pronounced when customers aggressively invest in research and development (R&D). Our results are robust after addressing self-selection bias and using different CEO overconfidence measures. We also document some real effects of customer CEO overconfidence on suppliers.
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Expectations, Infections, and Economic Activity
Martin S. Eichenbaum, Miguel Godinho de Matos, Francisco Lima, Sergio Rebelo, Mathias Trabandt
NBER Working Paper,
April
2022
Abstract
The Covid epidemic had a large impact on economic activity. In contrast, the dramatic decline in mortality from infectious diseases over the past 120 years had a small economic impact. We argue that people's response to successive Covid waves helps reconcile these two findings. Our analysis uses a unique administrative data set with anonymized monthly expenditures at the individual level that covers the first three Covid waves. Consumer expenditures fell by about the same amount in the first and third waves, even though the risk of getting infected was larger in the third wave. We find that people had pessimistic prior beliefs about the case-fatality rates that converged over time to the true case-fatality rates. Using a model where Covid is endemic, we show that the impact of Covid is small when people know the true case-fatality rate but large when people have empirically-plausible pessimistic prior beliefs about the case-fatality rate. These results reconcile the large economic impact of Covid with the small effect of the secular decline in mortality from infectious diseases estimated in the literature.
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Financing Choice and Local Economic Growth: Evidence from Brazil
Iftekhar Hasan, Thiago Christiano Silva, Benjamin Miranda Tabak
Journal of Economic Growth,
No. 3,
2021
Abstract
We study how financing non-traditional local activities, conceived here as a proxy for activity diversification, is associated with economic growth. We use municipality-level data from Brazil, a country with large geographical, social, and economic disparities observed across its more than 5500 municipalities. We find that finance to non-traditional local activities associates with higher municipal economic growth, suggesting a positive externality between the non-traditional and traditional sectors. Using large natural disasters in Brazil as sources of unexpected negative events, we find that this association between financing non-traditional local activities and economic growth becomes negative in times of distress. We find that traditional local sectors are more affected than non-traditional sectors following a natural disaster. Precisely because of the non-traditional sector’s dependence on the traditional sector, our results suggest that municipalities should restrengthen their traditional activities during adverse conditions.
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