Government risk premiums in the bond market: EMU and Canada

This paper focuses on risk premiums paid by central governments in Europe and sub-national governments in Germany, Spain, and Canada, using data for bond yield spreads for the period 1991–2005. We find that risk premiums by central governments respond positively to debt and deficits; German states enjoyed a favourable position in financial markets before EMU but not thereafter; Spanish and Canadian provinces risk premiums over the whole period; German and Spanish sub-central governments pay liquidity-related interest rate premiums; Canadian and German provinces/states that benefit from fiscal equalization lower spreads. This is evidence of market discipline at work and of credibility of the EU no-bailout clause.     

Fiskalpolitik nach der Krise

Die ?ffentlichen Haushalte sind durch die Wirtschafts- und Finanzkrise stark in Anspruch genommen. Au?erdem wurde, noch bevor der Ausgang der Krise absehbar war, in Deutschland die Schuldenbremse beschlossen. Bei den Autoren besteht Einigkeit darüber, dass die Nachkrisenzeit einer sensiblen Fiskalpolitik bedarf. über deren Ausgestaltung gehen die Auffassungen jedoch auseinander.     

Education and religious participation: city-level evidence from Germany’s secularization period 1890–1930

Why did substantial parts of Europe abandon the institutionalized churches around 1900? Empirical studies using modern data mostly contradict the traditional view that education was a leading source of the seismic social phenomenon of secularization. We construct a unique panel dataset of advanced-school enrollment and Protestant church attendance in German cities between 1890 and 1930. Our cross-sectional estimates replicate a positive association. By contrast, in panel models where fixed effects account for time-invariant unobserved heterogeneity, education—but not income or urbanization—is negatively related to church attendance. In panel models with lagged explanatory variables, educational expansion precedes reduced church attendance, while the reverse is not true. Dynamic panel models with lagged dependent variables and instrumental-variable models using variation in school supply confirm the results. The pattern of results across school types is most consistent with a mechanism of increased critical thinking in general rather than specific knowledge of natural sciences.     

Worker heterogeneity and labor market volatility in matching models

Shimer demonstrated that aggregate productivity shocks in a standard matching model cause fluctuations in key labor market statistics—such as the job-finding rate, the vacancy/unemployment ratio, and the unemployment rate—that are too small by an order of magnitude [Shimer, R., 2005. The cyclical behavior of equilibrium unemployment and vacancies. American Economic Review 95 (1) 25–49]. This paper shows that when the standard model is extended to allow for worker heterogeneity, it exhibits considerably greater volatility. In the model, marginal workers, whose productivity only slightly exceeds the value of their alternative use of time, constitute a disproportionate share of unemployment on average, and that share rises when aggregate conditions deteriorate. These composition effects cause firms to open fewer vacancies during downturns.     

Value‐at‐Risk bounds with two‐sided dependence information

Value‐at‐Risk (VaR) bounds for aggregated risks have been derived in the literature in settings where, besides the marginal distributions of the individual risk factors, one‐sided bounds for the joint distribution or the copula of the risks are available. In applications, it turns out that these improved standard bounds on VaR tend to be too wide to be relevant for practical applications, especially when the number of risk factors is large or when the dependence restriction is not strong enough. In this paper, we develop a method to compute VaR bounds when besides the marginal distributions of the risk factors, two‐sided dependence information in form of an upper and a lower bound on the copula of the risk factors is available. The method is based on a relaxation of the exact dual bounds that we derive by means of the Monge–Kantorovich transportation duality. In several applications, we illustrate that two‐sided dependence information typically leads to strongly improved bounds on the VaR of aggregations.