Zentrum für evidenzbasierte Politikberatung (IWH-CEP)

In response to the financial crisis of 2007/2008, policymakers implemented comprehensive changes concerning the regulation and supervision of banks. Many of those changes, including Basel III or the directives pertaining to the Single Rulebook in the European Union (EU), are agreed upon at the supranational level, which constitutes a key step towards harmonized regulation and supervision in an integrated European financial market. However, the success of these reforms depends on the uniform and timely implementation at the national level. Avoiding strategic delays to implement EU regulation into national laws should thus constitute a main target of the G20.

We analyze the inward and outward transmission of regulatory changes through German banks’ (international) loan portfolio. Overall, our results provide evidence for international spillovers of prudential instruments. These spillovers are, however, quite heterogeneous between types of banks and can only be observed for some instruments. For instance, domestic affiliates of foreign-owned global banks reduce their loan growth to the German economy in response to a tightening of sector-specific capital buffers, local reserve requirements, and loan-to-value ratios in their home country. Furthermore, from the point of view of foreign countries, tightening reserve requirements is effective in reducing lending inflows from German banks. Finally, we find that business and financial cycles matter for lending decisions.

In response to the Global Crisis, governments have implemented restructuring and resolution regimes backed by funds financed by bank levies. Bank levies aim to internalise system risk externalities and to provide funding for bank recovery and resolution. This column explores bank levy design by considering the German and European cases. The discussion points to the importance of structured policy evaluations to determine the effects of levies.

We construct a novel dataset to measure banks’ complexity and relate it to banks’ riskiness. The sample covers stock listed Euro area banks from 2007 to 2014. Bank stability is significantly affected by complexity, whereas the direction of the effect differs across complexity measures.

During the recent financial crisis, governments massively intervened in the banking sector by providing liquidity assistance and capital support to banks in distress. This helped stabilize the financial system in the short run. However, public bailouts also bear the risk of longer-term distortions, for example, by affecting bailout expectations of banks. In this chapter, the authors first provide an overview of state aid interventions during the recent crisis episode. The third section then analyzes the effects of state aid on financial stability from a theoretical view. This is followed by the description of results obtained from empirical studies. The link between the provision of state aid and politics is discussed in the section “Institutional Design and Policy Implications”. Finally, in the section “The European Banking Union” the authors describe the elements of the European Banking Union meant to resolve and restructure banks in distress and to lower the need for public intervention. Based on the preceding analysis, conclusions are drawn regarding the new design.

Bank distress can have severe negative consequences for the stability of the financial system. Regimes for the restructuring and resolution of banks, financed by bank levies, aim at reducing these costs. This paper evaluates the German bank levy, which has been implemented since 2011. Our analysis offers three main insights. First, revenues raised through the levy were lower than expected. Second, the bulk of the payments were contributed by large commercial banks and by the central institutions of savings banks and credit unions. Third, for those banks, which were affected by the levy, we find evidence for a reduction in lending and higher deposit rates.

Die Bedeutung der lokalisierten verbundenen Vielfalt für die internationale Diversifizierung von Unternehmenstechnik. Die Internationalisierung der Forschung und Entwicklung hat sich in den letzten Jahren erheblich verstärkt. In diesem Beitrag analysieren wir die Determinanten der räumlichen Verteilung von ausländischen Technikaktivitäten in 96 deutschen Regionen. Zur Identifizierung ausländischer Technikaktivitäten wird das Konzept des grenzübergreifenden Eigentums auf Patentanträge angewandt. Die wichtigste Prämisse lautet, dass Regionen mit einer höheren verbundenen Vielfalt von Technikaktivitäten zwischen den einzelnen Sektoren mehr ausländische Technikaktivitäten anziehen. Aus den Schätzungen geht hervor, dass dies auf Regionen zutrifft, die sich durch ein hohes Maß an genereller technischer Stärke auszeichnen. Dies lässt darauf schließen, dass verbundene Vielfalt die technische Diversifizierung von ausländischen Unternehmen in Regionen an der Spitze der geografischen Hierarchie begünstigt.

The German government provides discretionary investment grants to structurally weak regions to reduce regional disparities. We use a regression discontinuity design that exploits an exogenous discrete jump in the probability of receiving investment grants to identify the causal effects of the investment grant on regional outcomes. We find positive effects for regional gross value-added and productivity growth, but no effects for employment and gross wage growth.

In Deutschland besteht ein enormer Bedarf an evidenzbasierter Politikberatung. Viele wirtschaftspolitische Interventionen werden bislang nicht umfassend evaluiert, und falls doch, wenden die wenigsten Untersuchungen geeignete Verfahren der Kausalanalyse an, um einen ursächlichen Zusammenhang zwischen der Intervention und dem Erreichen von wirtschaftspolitischen Zielen zu identifizieren. Das Leibniz-Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung Halle hat für diese Aufgabe das Zentrum für evidenzbasierte Politikberatung (IWH-CEP) eingerichtet. Eine Pilotstudie zu den Wirkungen der betrieblichen Investitionsförderung ist bereits angelaufen.

Most research on R&D internationalisation focuses on comparative analysis of location factors at the national level of analysis. Very little work, however, has taken place in this field for the sub-national regional location behavior of multi-national enterprises (MNE). The paper contributes to the existing research by providing evidence on the determinants of foreign technological activities at the sub-national level for Germany, which hosts the largest share of foreign R&D within the EU27 and features the highest cross-regional dispersion of patented research. Using a pooled count data model, we estimate the effect of various sources for externalities on the extent of foreign technological activity across regions. Particular attention is paid to the role of local knowledge spillovers, technological specialization and diversification. We differentiate foreign and domestic sources of specialisation and account for region and sector-specific influences. This is the first time that the ‘cross-border-ownership’ principle to measure R&D internationalisation is combined with regionalised patent information. To verify our findings we develop hypotheses. In particular, we expect and find that foreign technological activity is attracted by technologically specialised sectors of regions. In contrast to current empirical work, this effect applies both to foreign as well as domestic sources of specialization, although effects on foreign specialization seem more significant. We expect and find the same for science-industry spillovers. We postulate a negative impact of domestic specialization on foreign technological activities and a strong positive effect from diversificationspillovers, by comparison with specialisation spillovers, but these hypotheses are rejected. We find that the direction of the specialisation effect depends on dominance in the position of domestic firms as well as on the balance of knowledge flows between them and foreign actors.