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Standard transaction cost arguments can only partially explain why the share of cash transactions is still high in many countries. This paper shows that consumers desire to monitor liquidity is one of the reasons. Consumers make use of a distinctive feature of cash a glance into ones pocket provides a signal for both the remaining budget as well as the level of past expenses. We propose a theoretical framework which incorporates this feature of cash, and derives implications not only for cash usage as such but also for a broader set of paymentrelated activities. Survey data from Germany on consumers payment and withdrawal patterns are used to test these implications empirically. The data are consistent with all theoretical predictions: consumers who need to keep control over their remaining liquidity and who have elevated costs of information processing and storage will conduct a larger percentage of their payments using cash, hold fewer non-cash payment instruments, withdddw less 5ften and hold larger ca0gh balances than other consumers. Such consumers also use payment cards for some transactions; they switch to non-cash payment instruments only at higher transaction values than other consumers, however. Our model provides an explanation of why cash usage has declined only slowly in some countries despite broad diffusion of non-cash means of payme

We propose a method for indentifying discretionary fiscal policy with real time data. The starting point is the observation that automatic stabilizers should depend on true GDP, while discretionary fiscal policy depends on the information that policy makers have in real time. We approximate the information set of policy makers with GDP data released in real time. True GDP is approximated using the last GDP release. Accordingly, we can compute a real time measurement error. Discretionary fiscal policy can be expected to react to this measurement error, whereas automatic fiscal policy will not. We apply this identification approach in order to test the central identifying assumption of Blanchard and Perotti's (2002) seminal structural VAR. According to this assumption, fiscal policy makers do not react to GDP evolutions contemporaneously in a discretionary fashion. We find that government expenditure is adjusted upward if GDP in real time is lower than true GDP. This suggests that fiscal policy makers can use short-term funds to buy goods and services in response to GDP updates. Our results therefore call the identifying assumption of Blanchard and Perotti's (2002) SVAR into question.

The interrelationship between financial constraints and firm activity is a hotly debated issue. The way firms cope with financial constraints is fundamental to the analysis of monetary transmission, of financial stability and of growth and development. The CBI Industrial Trends Survey contains detailed information on the financial constraints faced by a large sample of UK manufacturers. This paper uses the quarterly CBI Industrial Trends Survey firm level data between January 1989 and October 1999. The cleaned sample contains 49,244 quarterly observations on 5,196 firms. As more than 63% of the observations refer to firms with less than 200 employees, the data set is especially well suited for comparing large and small companies. The data set is presented and a new method of checking the informational content of the data is developed. Whereas the relationship between investment activity and financial constraints is theoretically ambivalent due to simultaneity, the link between financial constraints on the one hand and the prevalence and duration of capacity gaps on the other should be unambiguously positive. Looking at the relationship between both types of constraints, two important results emerge. First, there is shown to be informational content in the survey data on financial constraints. Specifically, financially constrained firms take longer to close capacity gaps. This indicates that financial constraints do indeed play a part in the investment process. Second, small firms close their capacity gaps faster than large firms do, but financial constraints seem to be of higher relevance to their adjustment dynamics.

The impact of uncertainty on firms' investment outlays is subject to an ongoing debate. Theory identifies several channels. Irreversibility, financing constraints and risk aversion make a negative relationship between uncertainty and investment likely. On the other hand, the ability of firms to adapt after uncertainty is resolved can make a risky strategy more attractive. Therefore, risk may also constitute an incentive to invest. The net effect is theoretically indeterminate. The empirical literature has not yet been able to settle the question. This paper studies the impact of uncertainty on firm's investment outlays using the database of the Deutsche Bundesbank's corporate balance sheet statistics. Our database represents roughly 75% of the total turnover of the west German manufacturing sector. The sample used for estimation contains 6,745 firms with almost 50,000 observations, covering the years 1987 - 1997. This is a period long enough to generate measures of uncertainty specific to both firm and time. Using panel econometric methods, we estimate the effect of sales uncertainty and cost uncertainty on investment demand. We obtain two key results. First, there is a moderately strong and consistently negative effect of uncertainty on investment. If both uncertainty indicators are increased by one standard deviation, the estimated investment demand will fall by 6ư% of its mean. Furthermore, it emerges that sales uncertainty and cost uncertainty are of equal importance for investment: both our indicators contribute about 3 percentage points to the total reduction of investment.

This paper proposes a new framework for studying the effects of monetary policy on business investment. Important ambiguities with the modeling of investment dynamics and interactions between real and financial decisions suggest modeling investment spending as a VAR. Based on a panel of financial statement data for 6,408 German firms (44,345 datapoints) supplemented with user costs of capital and confidential measures of creditworthiness, we generate GMM estimates of a Vectorautoregressive Investment Model (VIM). It contains investment and cash flow as endogenous variables, and the user costs of capital and sales growth as additional explanatory variables. We report four substantive findings. First, monetary policy matters, and business investment is responsive to interest rates embedded in the user cost of capital. Second, allowing real and financial decisions to interact raises the impact of monetary policy by one-third relative to simulations of an investment equation in isolation that assumes an exogenous financial policy. Third, the sensitivity of investment to cash flow shocks is raised by twothirds relative to single equation computations. Fourth, firms with poor credit ratings are "paralysed" in being unable to react to changing economic conditions as given by relative prices or demand. On the other hand and consistent with binding financing constraints, these endangered firms show a high responsiveness to cash flow shocks. Apart from these substantive conclusions, this paper demonstrate that the panel VAR approach is useful for modeling firm dynamics and real/financial interactions and for assessing monetary policy transmission.

The Panel on Household Finances (PHF) is a new panel survey on household finances and wealth in Germany conducted by the Deutsche Bundesbank. It covers the balance sheets, pension claims, savings, incomes and work histories of households, together with some information on consumption patterns, attitudes, expectations and standard demographic characteristics. This paper introduces the survey, highlights its main methodological features and presents initial results. The first wave of the survey was carried out between September 2010 and July 2011. It encompasses a net sample of 3,565 randomly selected households in Germany. Wealthy households are oversampled using micro-geographic indicators. The survey is designed to be a full panel. The micro data will be made available for scientific use. The next wave is scheduled for 2014. Aside from being a self-contained and comprehensive survey on household finances in Germany, the PHF is part of the Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS). This system of surveys collects ex ante harmonised micro data in every country of the euro area. -- Survey data ; household panel ; family economics ; household finance ; wealth distribution ; portfolio choice

We present a comparable set of results on the monetary transmission channels on firm investment for the four largest euro-area countries (Germany, France, Italy and Spain). With particularly rich micro datasets for each country containing over 215,000 observations from 1985 to 1999, we explore what can be learned about the interest channel and the broad credit channel. For each of those countries, we estimate neoclassical investment relationships, explaining investment by its user cost, sales and cash flow. We find investment to be sensitive to user cost changes in all those four countries. This implies an operative interest channel in these euro-area countries. We also find investment in all countries to be quite sensitive to cash flow movements. However, only in Italy do smaller firms react more to cash flow movements than large firms, implying that a broad credit channel might not be equally pervasive in all countries.