Bank capital regulation seems to be today's most accepted regulatory instrument. The reasoning is that limited liability and deposit insurance appear to give banks incentives for excessive risk-taking. Capital requirements can alleviate this problem as banks are obliged to hold more capital...

In this paper, we investigate the claim that German banks are special compared to banks in other industrialised economies. We show that banks are of particular importance to the German economy?as financial intermediary, as lender to the corporate sector, and as part of the corporate governance...

The aim of this paper is to assess how German savings banks adjust capital and risk under capital regulation. We estimate a modified version of the model developed by Shrieves and Dahl (1992). In comparison to former research, we impose fewer restrictions with regard to the impact of regulation...

We examine the indicator property of the monetary indicator for inflation. Using a P*-model, Svensson shows theoretically in a recent paper that the relationship between these two variables is rather tenuous. The present study employs empirical evidence on the relations in his model to quantify...

This paper shows that announced credible disinflations under inflation targeting lead to a boom in a standard New Keynesian model (i.e. a disinflationary boom). This finding is robust with respect to various parameterizations and disinflationary experiments. Thus, it differs from previous...

This paper analyzes the effects of short-time work (i.e., government subsidized working time reductions) on unemployment and output fluctuations. The central question is whether the rule based component (i.e., the existence of the institution short-time work) and the discretionary component...

This paper sheds new light on the effects of the minimum wage on employment from a two-sided theoretical perspective, in which firms' job offer and workers' job acceptance decisions are disentangled. Minimum wages reduce job offer incentives and increase job acceptance incentives. We show that...

Many labor market models use both idiosyncratic productivity and a vacancy free entry condition. This paper shows that these two features combined generate an equilibrium comovement between matches on the one hand and unemployment and vacancies on the other hand, which is observationally...

This paper is the first to show theoretically and empirically how firms' production technology affects the choice of their preferred wage formation regime. Our theoretical framework predicts, first, that the larger the total factor productivity of a firm, the more likely it is to opt for...

This paper reveals that German firms with working time accounts (WTAs) show a similar separation and hiring behavior in response to revenue changes as firms without WTAs. This finding casts doubt on the popular hypothesis that WTAs were the key driver of the unusually small increase in German...