Central banks and financial supervisors approach ‘green finance’ mostly to preserve macroeconomic and financial stability according to their mandates. Obviously, climate change poses severe risks to households, firms and their financial intermediaries. These risks tend to be correlated and...

The room for maneuver of monetary policy and the relevance of the zero lower bound of nominal interest rates are largely determined by the level of and the outlook for the natural rate of interest (R*), i.e. the unobservable equilibrium interest rate that neither stimulates nor contracts the...

This survey reviews the literature about the impact of climate change on the natural rate of interest (r*), an important yardstick for monetary policy. Economic and financial developments can lower r* in scenarios with increasing climate-related damages and uncertainty that reduce productivity...

Analyzing data from the Structure of Earnings Surveys we find that wage dispersion in Austria increased marginally between 1996 and 2002. There was an increase in the returns to education which accrued only to male workers. The positive effects of tenure and especially of experience on wages...

This paper tests whether the results from standard structure-conduct-performance [SCP] models estimated at the industry level are sensitive to the degree of heterogeneity of the firms in the industries. Industries are separated into homogeneous and heterogeneous categories depending on whether...

Density forecasts have become quite important in economics and finance. For example, such forecasts play a central role in modern financial risk management techniques like Value at Risk. This paper suggests a regression based density forecast evaluation framework as a simple alternative to other...

Volatility of financial returns as a measure of risk is a key parameter in asset pricing and risk management and holding periods for financial instruments of several weeks or month are common. Nevertheless, little is known about the predictability of return volatility at longer horizons. This...

This paper uses regression analysis to compare the market pricing of the default risk of banks to that of other firms. We study how CDS traders discriminate between banks and other type of firms and how their judgement changes over time, in particular, since the start of the recent financial...

We estimate the effects of stock market volatility on the growth rates of durable consumption, non-durable consumption and invest- ment using post-war US data. Our results indicate that high levels of stock market volatility exert large adverse effects on the growth rates of investment and...

We study the development of bank lending in the U.S. after four large jumps in uncertainty using an event study approach. We find that more liquid banks reduce lending less than banks with smaller liquidity ratios after a surge in uncertainty. Lending by smaller banks is also less responsive to...