List of completed PhD Theses/Dissertations by members and associated scientists of SPP 1859:
No 16:
Niemann, Knut (2024): Essays in Empirical Macroeconomics
This dissertation features three chapters that each make relevant contributions to economic research. The first two chapters focus on expectations that take center stage in modern macroeconomics. Specifically, we consider firm expectations about their own variables. For the empirical analysis, we use the German ifo survey and, additionally, in the second chapter, an Italian firm survey run by the Banca d’Italia. We distinguish micro news, that is, new information about the individual firm, and macro news, that is, new information about the aggregate economy. Relating news to firms’ forecast errors, we find that firms systematically overreact to micro news and underreact to macro news. The third chapter changes focus on the current debate about decoupling or de-risking in international trade. It introduces political distance as a novel type of trade costs into a gravity model and presents a new panel on sectoral trade.
No 15:
Pavlova, Lora (2023): Essays on Survey Expectations
The dissertation investigates several topics concerning the collection and application of survey expectations data. Conceptually, the thesis consists of three parts: (i) elicitation of consumer expectations in a probabilistic format, (ii) quantifying uncertainty at the individual level and at different horizons, (iii) application of consumer inflation expectations data collected through surveys to answer topical monetary policy questions. While Chapter 2 critically discusses different ways of eliciting probabilistic inflation expectations of consumers, Chapters 3 and 4 tackle the measurement of subjective uncertainty derived from such histograms. Chapter 5 illustrates how data on inflation expectations of consumers elicited in an information-experimental framework can be used to analyze how consumers would react to a hypothetical monetary policy strategy change in the euro area.
No 14:
Steinbrecher, Hendrik (2023): Taxing High and Paying Low – Essays on German Fiscal Policy between the Wars
No 13:
Ettmeier, Stephanie (2023): From Policy to Practice: Applying Empirical Analysis and Historic Contexts to Understand Fiscal and Monetary Policy, and their Interaction
The dissertation draws on empirical evidence to deepen our understanding on the distributional and macroeconomic effects of fiscal policy, the causal analysis of monetary policy transmission, and the interaction of fiscal and monetary policies. In particular, this dissertation combines studies on the effect of US tax changes on the cross-sectional distribution of disposable income, the macroeconomic consequences of Chancellor Heinrich Brüning's austerity intervention at the height of the Great Depression in Germany, the performance of four widely-used and directly measured monetary policy shock instruments in terms of identifying the causal effects of monetary policy, and the role of US fiscal policy in the pre-Volcker inflation build-up.
No 12:
Neuner, Ricardo (2022): Die Vermessung des Verbrauchers – Konsumpsychologie und Verhaltenspolitik (1930-1990)
Im Zentrum der Arbeit steht das Problem, dass Verbraucher kaum den Erwartungen gerecht werden, die eine liberale Ökonomie wie die der USA ab den 1930 an sie stellt. Die wachsende Kaufkraft der Verbraucher soll eine neuartige, freiheitliche Gesellschaft im Überschuss etablieren. In der Theorie fordern Ökonomen dazu rationale Akteure, die kluge Kaufentscheidungen treffen, statt sich von ihrem Emotionen leiten zu lassen. In der Praxis der Werbegestalter in New York und Chicago, die die neue Konsumgesellschaft vor Augen haben, setzt man hingegen auf einen entfesselten Verbraucher, der endlich die Hemmungen seiner protestantischen Sparsamkeit ablegen soll. Im diesem Spannungsfeld von Kalkül und Leidenschaft wird der Verbraucher seit den 1930er Jahren zunehmend zu einer politischen Figur, deren Entscheidungen nicht nur ökonomische, sondern auch soziale, kulturelle und ökologische Konsequenzen haben. Mein Projekt untersucht bis in die 1990er Jahre hinein, wie sozial- und kognitionspsychologische Ansätze bei den Steuerungsversuchen der Verbraucher zur Anwendung kommen. Anhand dieses Beispiels geht die Arbeit der Frage nach, bis zu welchem Grad Steuerung und Regulierung der Verbraucher in einer marktförmigen und liberalen Gesellschaft berechtigt und notwendig sind.
No 11:
Höhne (née Rassow), Verena (2022): Entstehung und Praktiken der deutschen Fusionskontrolle. Eine Untersuchung zu Verfahren der chemischen Industrie vor dem Bundeskartellamt (1973 – 1989).
Die Arbeit rekonstruiert die Einführung und Entwicklung der deutschen Fusionskontrolle im Gesetz gegen Wettbewerbsbeschränkungen (GWB) und kann anhand von zahlreichen, vom Bundeskartellamt erstmals der Forschung zur Verfügung gestellten Verfahrensakten die jeweiligen Praktiken des Amtes herausarbeiten. Es werden sowohl die Ursachen, die zur Einführung einer Fusionskontrollnorm in Deutschland führten, herausgearbeitet, als auch die Erwartungsprognose durch die Akteure des Bundeskartellamtes analysiert. Insbesondere drei Fragenkreise stehen bei der Auswertung im Vordergrund. Erstens, wie die Beamten des Bundeskartellamtes die Vorschriften der Fusionskontrolle auslegten und welche Verfahrensformen dafür entwickelt wurden, zweitens, wie sich das Informationsmanagement der Behörde institutionalisierte und drittens, wie eine konkrete Erwartungsprognose bei Fusionen getroffen wurde.
No 10:
Müller, Karsten (cumulative dissertation, 2021): Macroeconomic Forecasts for Germany. The Quality of Forecasts in the Light of various Evaluation Approaches.
Macroeconomic forecasts play a formative role for agents’ macroeconomic expectations. The main purpose of this dissertation was to analyse and determine the quality of macroeconomic forecasts for Germany. Apart from the commonly used statistical measures of forecasting accuracy, the dissertation explored a number of alternative approaches to analyse the quality of the forecasts of leading German institutes of business cycle research. Issues such as the economic value of forecasts and the evaluation of forecasters’ rationality and their behaviour are just as important as forecasters’ narratives. These topics were the theoretical focus of this dissertation. A number of methodological techniques were applied to analyse the main issues. In the introductory section, we provide an exposition to the importance of forecasts and forecast evaluation in economic decision-making processes. The investigation in this dissertation delivered various insights regarding the quality of business cycle forecasts for Germany. First, good forecasts in accordance with the statistical indicators do not go hand in hand with good economic performances; rather, the opposite is true. Second, analysis of forecasters’ behaviour suggests changed forecasters’ loss and behaviour after the Great Recession. Third, not only well-established economic indicators as exogenous variable can enhance forecast performance, but also the forecasters’ own narratives.
No 9:
In Zeiten von Fake News und alternativen Wahrheiten ist eine zunehmende Erosion des gesellschaftlichen Stellenwerts wissenschaftlicher Experten zu beobachten. Diese »Krise des Expertentums« betrifft besonders wirtschaftspolitische Experten, die seit der letzten Finanzkrise unter einem Vertrauensverlust seitens der Öffentlichkeit leiden. Mit Hilfe von Verfahren des Text Mining zeichnet Lino Wehrheim nach, wie sich die öffentliche Resonanz dieser Expertengruppe seit den 1960er Jahren entwickelt hat. Dazu untersucht er das wohl prominenteste deutsche Gremium wirtschaftspolitischer Expertise: den Sachverständigenrat zur Begutachtung der gesamtwirtschaftlichen Entwicklung, auch bekannt als der »Olymp der Ökonomen«. Neben der Auswertung der Publikationen des Rates steht hierbei die Frage im Mittelpunkt, wie sich dessen mediale und politische Resonanz seit seiner Gründung in den 1960er Jahren verändert hat und durch welche Determinanten diese Resonanz beeinflusst wurde.
No 8:
Lenel, Laetitia (2021): The Hopeful Science. A Transatlantic History of Business Forecasting, 1920-1960, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin: Dissertation.
How is it possible that most people agree that economists generally fail to foresee recessions and that forecasting has nevertheless not lost its appeal and importance? This paradox has formed the starting point of The Hopeful Science. By tracing the transatlantic history of business forecasting between 1920 and 1960 and its implications for economic and political decision-making until the late 1980s, this dissertation looks for an answer. In five chapters that focus on the origins and the transnational and, in some cases, global circulation of five different forecasting tools and techniques, this dissertation investigates how the role of business forecasting has changed over the course of the twentieth century, and how this was both a factor and an indicator of a changed conception of economic change and economics’ place in it that, in turn, shaped economic and political decision-making. As The Hopeful Science argues, business forecasting has produced several, often unforeseen and unintended effects, and in the process turned into an indispensable tool to reduce economic uncertainty and stabilize the capitalist order.
Laetitia's dissertation was awarded the Humboldt Prize (2021), the Johann Gustav Droysen Prize (2022), the Friedrich Lütge Prize (2023), and the Otto Hintze Prize (2023).
No 7:
ter Stege, Lucas (2020): Essays on Inflation Expectations, Leaning Against the Wind Policy, and Consumer Bankruptcy
No 6:
Mertens, Armin (2020): Business Power in European Politics, University of Cologne.
No 5:
No 4:
Christopher Behrens (cumulative dissertation, 2020): The optimality of investment decisions of firms and the decisions of households to consume durable goods.
Professional forecasts published by economic research institutes are one important source of information on how the macroeconomic environment is likely to change in the future. Thus, studying the efficiency and unbiasedness of such professional forecasts is of crucial importance. Much of the research so far, however, has focused on growth and inflation forecasts. Less is known about the properties of trade forecasts.
The purpose of this dissertation is to close this gap in the earlier literature. To this end, I analyze export and import growth forecasts since 1970 published by several leading German economic research institutes like the Kiel Institute for the World Economy and the German Institute for Economic Research. For the evaluation, I employ several state-of-the-art methods to analyze different aspects of the trade forecasts. I use nonparametric models, namely regression and classification forests, as well as a panel-based model.
By means of these models I am able to study the individual forecasting performance of the German economic research institutes and take into account nonlinearities among the analyzed macroeconomic aggregates. The panel-based model is a rather classical approach, allowing for an analysis of German trade forecasts as a whole and over time. The study uses a novel data set, which comprises, in addition to German export and import growth forecasts, a set of macroeconomic aggregates I use to proxy the forecasters' information sets at the time of forecast formation.
No 3:
Expectations play a fundamental role for the dynamics of modern economies. They facilitate decision-making in the light of an unknown future. The media certainly contribute to the formation and transmission of expectations by providing information and perceptions of other actors. Both the information they provide and the narratives they tell can be influential on economic and financial markets. In this thesis, I investigate the relationship between the media, the expectations they convey, and economic outcomes in three empirical studies. With a historical focus on two great crises, my approach is to combine text analyses of media articles with economic and financial variables.
First, I analyze inflation expectations in the recovery from the Great Depression in Germany. I conduct a narrative study of media sources and apply a frequency analysis of words related to inflation in newspaper articles. I relate my findings to inflation forecasts from a factor model, quantitative news series and using the real interest rate. For the case of the United States a regime shift towards increased inflation expectations is credited with jump-starting the recovery from the Great Depression. Germany experienced a recovery similarly successful in the 1930s. Consistently across the approaches, the evidence presented in this chapter does not indicate a shift towards increased inflation expectations. Therefore, the causes for Germany’s recovery lie elsewhere.
The second study focuses on news coverage during the Greek debt crisis from 2009 to 2015. I investigate the role of global media in the transmission of events to financial markets. To identify news coverage about the Greek debt crisis, I apply topic modeling to a newly compiled extensive dataset of articles from global newspapers. I identify a Greek debt crisis topic and relate it to events concerning Greece during this time period. I find that events are only relevant for financial markets if they are covered in the media, whereas events without media coverage in global newspapers have no effect. News coverage without immediate events is not relevant for financial markets.
In the third part, I take a qualitative perspective and evaluate the results from topic modeling with respect to news coverage in the Greek debt crisis. For a selection of articles a possible causality between the news coverage and the financial markets will be examined in a structured content analysis. My findings suggest that a causal nexus between news coverage and credit conditions is possible on the majority of dates. Moreover, the analysis shows that topic modeling is carrying out a meaningful classification of the news coverage about the Greek debt crisis.
No 2:
The central purpose of this dissertation is to study investors characteristics, as well as investment decisions on the different German stock exchanges in the period 1869 to 1955. It offers three studies that reveal typical characteristics of investors and their investment behavior over time. Increasing our knowledge of investors and how they built expectations therefore crucially improves our understanding about the economic and political situation in Germany in the considered time period.
The dataset is new and unique and includes information of more than 10,000 individual investors. The investors data are taken from archival resources containing lists of shareholders who attended a firms’ general assembly, shareholder books of different companies, portfolio choices over the lifetime of a single private banker and diary entries of individual investors.
The first part of this dissertation presents a study of investors characteristics and the ownership structure of joint-stock firms for the period of 1869 to 1945. It is shown that after the hyperinflation of 1923, when shares became cheaper, the ownership share among lower social classes rose significantly. Moreover, with the rise of women rights after 1919, the number of shares owned by women also increased significantly. However, despite these shifts, the majority of shares remained in the hands of institutional investors and investors from the upper class.
The second part analyzes investors’ expectations and investment decisions in regional stock exchanges in Germany from 1898 to 1934. The statistical analysis, which is based on shareholder lists attending general meetings first indicates that local investment was clearly important during this period. Then, challenging these findings and analyzing different sub-samples, suggests that investors’ home bias is potentially overestimated using this kind of source. In a supplementary exploration of so-called shareholder books, it is shown that the home bias phenomenon was indeed present.
The bias towards local investments can to a large extent be explained by overall economic and political circumstances, the general performance of the market and the level of activity of the investor. The examination of portfolio choices over the period 1923 to 1955 of the private banker Joseph Frisch, in Stuttgart, shows that the preference for local shares was highest in times of insecurity, low returns and reduced investment activity. Furthermore, the analysis of diary entries of an investor from the late 19th century provides further insights into the investment behavior.
The final part of this dissertation gives a general conclusion and a brief outlook about future Research.
No 1:
This dissertation aims at advancing our understanding of the state-finance nexus in times of globalized financial market capitalism. It sheds light on the profound changes that have occurred on both sides of this relationship since OECD countries have transitioned into debt states since the 1970s. This is done in a first part by examining the financialization of the state in the area of government debt management. Based on the development of a concept that makes it possible to measure this phenomenon, a discernible trend is shown according to which states have aligned their handling of debt with financial markets along two dimensions.
First, the sense-making frameworks that guide action in debt management, nowadays, originate from financial economics, so that a portfolio view on indebtedness has found its way into the public realm. Second, the financial market has become the predominant governance mechanism in which economic coordination takes place in this area. Thus, states have increasingly adopted financial market logics and practices in public finance, one of the core areas of modern democracies. At the same time, governments have made a decisive contribution to the development of modern financial markets by the increasing orientation towards international investors and marketability of public debt. These interpenetrations of politics and finance are not limited to the national, but also extend to the subnational level. Local governments in Germany, the US and UK have introduced financial derivatives since the 1980s and continue to use them in some cases, even though they suffered major losses from these instruments during the financial crisis. By combining political economy with an economic sociological perspective, the causes that led to the local manifestation of this phenomenon are scrutinized. It is shown that the chronically underfinanced municipalities hoped to regain financial and political leeway through the use of financial innovations, which were strongly promoted and lobbied by financial institutions.
The second part of the thesis analyzes the state-finance nexus from the perspective of the financial industry and the business with public debt, which is embodied in the emergence of pure public sector lending banks in the German mortgage banking sector. Unpacking the manifold state-banks relations demonstrates that the historical emergence of this crisis-ridden business model focusing on public finance closely interacts with the different roles played by the state in financial markets as economic policy maker, borrower, regulator and supervisor. The state is deeply involved in the process of coping with competition between banks by enabling change and stabilization of the social structures in which banks’ activities play out.
Overall, this dissertation reiterates that the relationship between the state and finance is by no means one-sided, but rather characterized by mutual conditionality. It further highlights that the state-finance nexus is a complex configuration that also arises from the multilayered nature of the two entities themselves. Neither the financial sector nor the state are monolithic, but highly differentiated social arenas in which different actors and interests coexist. It is therefore of great importance that intra-state politics and dynamic relations within both entities are taken into account when studying relations between state and finance.