Aleksandr Kazakov, Michael Koetter, Mirko Titze, Lena Tonzer
Abstract
We study whether government subsidies can stimulate bank funding of marginal investment projects and the associated effect on financial stability. We do so by exploiting granular project-level information for the largest regional economic development programme in Germany since 1997: the Improvement of Regional Economic Structures programme (GRW). By combining the universe of subsidised firms to virtually all German local banks over the period 1998-2019, we test whether this large-scale transfer programme destabilised regional credit markets. Because GRW subsidies to firms are destabilised at the EU level, we can use it as an exogenous shock to identify bank responses. On average, firm subsidies do not affect bank lending, but reduce banks’ distance to default. Average effects conflate important bank-level heterogeneity though. Conditional on various bank traits, we show that well capitalised banks with more industry experience expand lending when being exposed to subsidised firms without exhibiting more risky financial profiles. Our results thus indicate that stable banks can act as an important facilitator of regional economic development policies. Against the backdrop of pervasive transfer payments to mitigate Covid-19 losses and in light of far-reaching transformation policies required to green the economy, our study bears important implications as to whether and which banks to incorporate into the design of transfer Programmes.
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Trade Shocks, Labour Markets and Elections in the First Globalisation
Richard Bräuer, Wolf-Fabian Hungerland, Felix Kersting
Abstract
This paper studies the economic and political effects of a large trade shock in agriculture – the grain invasion from the Americas – in Prussia during the first globalisation (1871-1913). We show that this shock accelerated the structural change in the Prussian economy through migration of workers to booming cities. In contrast to studies using today’s data, we do not observe declining per capita income and political polarisation in counties affected by foreign competition. Our results suggest that the negative and persistent effects of trade shocks we see today are not a universal feature of globalisation, but depend on labour mobility. For our analysis, we digitise data from Prussian industrial and agricultural censuses on the county level and combine it with national trade data at the product level. We exploit the cross-regional variation in cultivated crops within Prussia and instrument with Italian trade data to isolate exogenous variation.
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Political Cycles in Bank Lending to the Government
Michael Koetter, Alexander Popov
Review of Financial Studies,
No. 6,
2021
Abstract
We study how political party turnover after German state elections affects banks’ lending to the regional government. We find that between 1992 and 2018, party turnover at the state level leads to a sharp and substantial increase in lending by local savings banks to their home-state government. This effect is accompanied by an equivalent reduction in private lending. A statistical association between political party turnover and government lending is absent for comparable cooperative banks that exhibit a similar regional organization and business model. Our results suggest that political frictions may interfere with government-owned banks’ local development objectives.
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Productivity and Employment in APAC Economies: A Comparison With the EU Using Firm-Level Information
Hoang Minh Duy, Filippo di Mauro, Peter Morgan
ADBI Working Paper,
No. 1264,
2021
Abstract
We provide an overview of productivity development and other related indicators in Asia and Pacific (APAC) countries, with comparisons with the Europe region. We use the seventh vintage firm-level data from the Productivity Research Network in the APAC region and CompNet in Europe for our study. The overall results show that the productivity growth in developed APAC countries (Australia, New Zealand, and the Republic of Korea) is significantly ahead of the growth in developing APAC countries (India and the People’s Republic of China) and on par with the EU’s growth. There is an ongoing process of bottom firms catching up with top firms in the Republic of Korea and the richest EU countries. Regarding employment and labor skills, employment growth has generally been quite stagnant in all regions. Labor skills, for which we use the wage premium as a proxy, are quite similar across most regions, with the richest EU countries showing a higher premium than the rest. Our test of the productivity–employment link indicates that the size of employment tends to have a greater impact on productivity in APAC countries, while labor skills have greater emphasis in the EU.
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The Appropriateness of the Macroeconomic Imbalance Procedure for Central and Eastern European Countries
Geraldine Dany-Knedlik, Martina Kämpfe, Tobias Knedlik
Empirica,
No. 1,
2021
Abstract
The European Commission’s Scoreboard of Macroeconomic Imbalances is a rare case of a publicly released early warning system. It was published first time in 2012 by the European Commission as a reaction to public debt crises in Europe. So far, the Macroeconomic Imbalance Procedure takes a one-size-fits-all approach with regard to the identification of thresholds. The experience of Central and Eastern European Countries during the global financial crisis and in the resulting public debt crises has been largely different from that of other European countries. This paper looks at the appropriateness of scoreboard of the Macroeconomic Imbalances Procedure of the European Commission for this group of catching-up countries. It is shown that while some of the indicators of the scoreboard are helpful to predict crises in the region, thresholds are in most cases set too narrow since it largely disregarded the specifics of catching-up economies, in particular higher and more volatile growth rates of various macroeconomic variables.
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Transmitting Fiscal Covid-19 Counterstrikes Effectively: Mind the Banks!
Reint E. Gropp, Michael Koetter, William McShane
IWH Online,
No. 2,
2020
Abstract
The German government launched an unprecedented range of support programmes to mitigate the economic fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic for employees, self-employed, and firms. Fiscal transfers and guarantees amount to approximately €1.2 billion by now and are supplemented by similarly impressive measures taken at the European level. We argue in this note that the pandemic poses, however, also important challenges to financial stability in general and bank resilience in particular. A stable banking system is, in turn, crucial to ensure that support measures are transmitted to the real economy and that credit markets function seamlessly. Our analysis shows that banks are exposed rather differently to deteriorated business outlooks due to marked differences in their lending specialisation to different economic sectors. Moreover, a number of the banks that were hit hardest by bleak growth prospects of their borrowers were already relatively thinly capitalised at the outset of the pandemic. This coincidence can impair the ability and willingness of selected banks to continue lending to their mostly small and medium sized entrepreneurial customers. Therefore, ensuring financial stability is an important pre-requisite to also ensure the effectiveness of fiscal support measures. We estimate that contracting business prospects during the first quarter of 2020 could lead to an additional volume of non-performing loans (NPL) among the 40 most stressed banks ‒ mostly small, regional relationship lenders ‒ on the order of around €200 million. Given an initial stock of NPL of €650 million, this estimate thus suggests a potential level of NPL at year-end of €1.45 billion for this fairly small group of banks already. We further show that 17 regional banking markets are particularly exposed to an undesirable coincidence of starkly deteriorating borrower prospects and weakly capitalised local banks. Since these regions are home to around 6.8% of total employment in Germany, we argue that ensuring financial stability in the form of healthy bank balance sheets should be an important element of the policy strategy to contain the adverse real economic effects of the pandemic.
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Coal Phase-out in Germany – Implications and Policies for Affected Regions
Pao-Yu Oei, Hauke Hermann, Philipp Herpich, Oliver Holtemöller, Benjamin Lünenbürger, Christoph Schult
Energy,
April
2020
Abstract
The present study examines the consequences of the planned coal phase-out in Germany according to various phase-out pathways that differ in the ordering of power plant closures. Soft-linking an energy system model with an input-output model and a regional macroeconomic model simulates the socio-economic effects of the phase-out in the lignite regions, as well as in the rest of Germany. The combination of two economic models offers the advantage of considering the phase-out from different perspectives and thus assessing the robustness of the results. The model results show that the lignite coal regions will exhibit losses in output, income and population, but a faster phase-out would lead to a quicker recovery. Migration to other areas in Germany and demographic changes will partially compensate for increasing unemployment, but support from federal policy is also necessary to support structural change in these regions.
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Spillovers of Asset Purchases Within the Real Sector: Win-Win or Joy and Sorrow?
Talina Sondershaus
IWH Discussion Papers,
No. 22,
2019
Abstract
Events which have an adverse or positive effect on some firms can disseminate through the economy to firms which are not directly affected. By exploiting the first large sovereign bond purchase programme of the ECB, this paper investigates whether more lending to some firms spill over to firms in the surroundings of direct beneficiaries. Firms operating in the same industry and region invest less and reduce employment. The paper shows the importance to consider spillover effects when assessing unconventional monetary policies: Differences between treatment and control groups can be entirely attributed to negative effects on the control group.
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02.10.2019 • 21/2019
Thanks to robust domestic demand, the impact of the manufacturing sector on East Germany is less severe than in the west – Implications of the Autumn 2019 Joint Economic Forecast and official regional data for the eastern German economy
In its autumn report, the Joint Economic Forecast Project Group states that the German economy has cooled further in the current year. The manufacturing sector is the main reason for the economic weakness. This affects the economy in East Germany as well.
Oliver Holtemöller
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