0000000001114862
AUTHOR
Beatrice Weder Di Mauro
International competitiveness, job creation and job destruction—An establishment-level study of German job flows
Abstract This study investigates the impact of international competitiveness on net employment, job creation, job destruction, and gross job flows for a representative sample of German establishments from 1993 to 2005. We find a statistically significant but economically small effect of real exchange rate shocks on employment, comparable to the one found in studies for the United States. However, contrary to the United States, the employment adjustment (among surviving firms) operates mainly through the job creation rather than the job destruction rate. Job destruction occurs essentially through discrete events such as restructuring, outsourcing and bankruptcy. We suggest that these finding…
ON THE HETEROGENEOUS EMPLOYMENT EFFECTS OF OFFSHORING: IDENTIFYING PRODUCTIVITY AND DOWNSIZING CHANNELS
I. INTRODUCTION For the most part of the last two decades Germany suffered from a hangover of the reunification boom, an overvalued exchange rate, high unemployment, and low growth--so The Economist famously named it the "Sick Man of Europe." At the same time, German companies were relocating production, restructuring, and offshoring. The general public associated such offshoring activities--not only in Germany--with plant closures which made the headlines and confirmed the perception that offshoring was a job killer.1 What usually does not make the news is that such downsizing effects of offshoring may be counterbalanced by productivity effects in the restructuring firm. Depending on their…
Quantifying Structural Subsidy Values for Systemically Important Financial Institutions
Abstract Claimants to Systemically Important Financial Institutions (SIFIs) would receive transfers when governments are forced into bailouts. Ex ante, this bailout expectation lowers SIFIs’ daily funding costs. The funding cost advantage reflects both the structural level of the government support and the time-varying market valuation for such a support. Based on a large worldwide sample of banks, we estimate the value of the structural subsidy, by exploiting expectations of state support embedded in credit ratings and by applying the long-run average value of the rating bonus. The value of the structural subsidy was already sizable, 60 basis points (bp), as of the end-2007, before the cri…
Financial Sector Reform After the Subprime Crisis: Has Anything Happened?
We analyze the reactions of stock returns and the spreads of credit default swaps (CDS) of banks from Europe and the USA to four major regulatory reforms in the aftermath of the subprime crisis, employing an event study analysis. Contrary to public perception, we find that financial markets indeed reacted to the structural reforms enacted at the national level. The reforms succeeded in reducing bail-out expectations relative to the post-bail-out period, especially for systemic banks. The strongest effects were found for the Dodd–Frank Act and in particular for the Volcker rule. Bank profitability was affected in all countries, showing up in lower equity returns.
Financial Sector Reform After the Crisis: Has Anything Happened?
We analyze the reactions of stock returns and CDS spreads of banks from Europe and the United States to four major regulatory reforms in the aftermath of the subprime crisis, employing an event study analysis. In contrast to the public perception that nothing has happened, we find that financial markets indeed reacted to the structural reforms enacted at the national level. All reforms succeeded in reducing bail-out expectations, especially for systemic banks. However, banks' profitability was also affected, showing up in lower equity returns. The strongest effects were found for the Dodd-Frank Act (especially the Volcker rule), whereas market reactions to the German restructuring law were …