Suchergebnisse

We tackle two questions in this paper: In the sovereign debt crisis, what moves the euro area inflation outlook and has the firm anchoring of medium to long-term inflation expectations been touched? Deriving densities from a new data set on options on the euro area harmonized index of consumer prices provides us with the full distribution of inflation expectations. The daily data set allows us to analyze effects of monetary policy announcements and macro news in a time varying event study framework despite the short sample period from 2009 to 2013. Due to renewed fears of deflation we compare option-implied and statistical density functions to gain insight into deflation risk. Inflation expectations show a decreasing mean but growing uncertainty especially since the intensification of the sovereign debt crisis in mid-2011. Around the same time the influence of monetary policy announcements on inflation expectations diminished. Tail events such as deflation although still contained became more probable. The impact of macroeconomic news to explain inflation probabilities overall decreased and shifted towards countries more affected by the crisis. Concerning the anchoring of inflation expectations the paper provides a twofold result: The mean and low sensitivity to actual news speak for anchored inflation expectations whereas the growing uncertainty reveals market participants concerns about possible extreme inflation or deflation outcomes in the future.

AbstractWe analyse the macroeconomic effects of exogenous contractions in bank lending to non‐financial corporations in the euro area, Germany, France, Italy and Spain using a BVAR model with endogenous hyperparameter selection and identification via sign restrictions. We investigate the behaviour of firms' external financing sources alternative to bank loans: financing via equity, debt securities, trade credit and lending from non‐banks. We analyse the comovement of these financing sources with bank lending using the joint posterior distribution of their impulse responses with that of bank loans. For the euro area our results show equity, debt securities and non‐bank loans to be substitutes for bank loans in general equilibrium with negative responses to a positive loan supply shock while trade credit is a complement and responds positively. Quantitatively, the developments in bank loans and trade credit dominate the response of the overall sum of external financing. However, whether and which of the alternative financing sources are substitutes for or complements to bank loans in general equilibrium differs across countries.

Cyclically induced changes in taxes and government expenditures which tend to stabilise aggregate output are called automatic stabilisers. Using a small macro model, this paper reviews alternative methods of measuring the smoothing power of automatic stabilisers and discusses their relationship to the Ricardian Equivalence Theorem. Based on simulation exercises with the macroeconometric multi-country model of the Deutsche Bundesbank, the empirical part of the paper presents estimates of the smoothing power of automatic stabilisers for Germany and some other OECD countries. The results for Germany suggest that in the first year 15 to 20 per cent of an exogenous demand shock are absorbed by the automatic stabilisers. Similar results are obtained for France, Italy, the Netherlands, UK, Canada and the US.