Using a representative German household survey experiment conducted in 2025, this paper estimates the causal effects of supply constraints on inflation expectations. Exposure to hypothetical shortages raises the likelihood of revising expectations by almost 10 percentage points. The effects differ between official and personal inflation expectations: pooling the shortage treatments increases official inflation expectations, with longer disruptions generating greater dispersion, whereas personal inflation expectations rise under both scenarios. Households appear to process supply-side news through personal experience rather than solely macroeconomic reasoning, with effects mediated by perceptions of the economic importance of shortages. Personal experience, prior exposure to earlier supply-disruption information and financial-economic literacy shape belief updating. Open-ended responses reveal disappointment and frustration as the most common reactions, with fear more likely under shortage scenarios.

This paper analyses the extensive and intensive margins of demand for a retail digital euro. We conducted a representative survey in France, Germany and Italy in November-December 2023. We find that 52-62% of respondents are willing to hold a digital euro, depending on the interest rate spread, with a higher share in Italy than in France or Germany. Design features (cash-like vs deposit-like) appear to play only a very limited role. Average demand depends on the hypothetical interest rate spread relative to current accounts and ranges from EUR 700 to EUR 1,100, implying an aggregate demand of 1.5-2.5% of GDP. Willingness to hold a digital euro is associated with socio-demographic factors, trust in the ECB and the EU, digitalisation and payment behaviour. Negative interest rate spreads relative to current accounts reduce willingness to hold the digital euro more strongly than positive spreads increase it. Behavioural characteristics tend to be correlated with the likelihood of adoption, whereas economic factors, particularly income and interest rates, are mainly related to the level of demand. This distinction becomes more pronounced when conditioning on positive demand, suggesting that socio-demographic factors primarily influence participation decisions rather than quantities demanded.

Do gender differences matter for politicians’ budgetary behaviour when confronted with an exogenous change in the institutional framework? After the 2013 Spanish municipal reform, municipalities with more than 20,000 inhabitants were no longer responsible for managing the provision of social services. Using a difference-in-differences estimator in a sample of municipalities from the Madrid region for 2010−2019, we compare gender differences in social services spending before and after the reform between municipalities below 20,000 inhabitants (control group) and above 20,000 inhabitants (treatment group). Although social spending was, on average, significantly reduced in the treatment group post-reform, we observe significant differences between municipalities conditional on the gender composition of local governments, i.e. council and mayor. Whereas male-dominated governments cut social expenditure by about 20% of the total budget, gender-balanced and female-dominated governments did not. Moreover, gender-balanced governments combined with female mayors increased social services spending by 40% more than gender-balanced governments combined with male mayors. This finding supports the claim that social spending is, on average, of particular importance to female politicians, as they are willing to bend the law to uphold their interests.

A sizeable literature analyses how immigration affects attitudes towards migrants and discusses differences between socio-economic groups and their potential correlation with perceived concerns about labour market competition. Against the background of the large-scale influx of refugees into Germany between 2015 and 2016, this paper uses data from a unique and representative survey of the German population to assess whether respondents express fears of job loss due to immigration. We focus on the importance of perceptions of migrants’ ability to do one’s job in relation to these fears. Moreover, we compare concerns about refugees with those about EU migrants and propose several hypotheses. Our findings indicate that: (i) Respondents are more likely to view EU migrants as potential competitors in the labour market. (ii) Workers in blue-collar occupations and without tertiary education are more likely to view migrants as potential competitors on the labour market. (iii) The perception of potential competition from migrants strongly predicts fear of job loss. Once we control for this perception, occupation and skill levels are no longer significantly related to the probability of reporting fear of job loss. Moreover, there are no longer significant differences between the two migrant groups. (iv) Anti-migrant sentiments are also associated with concerns about job loss.

This paper analyses the convergence patterns of German housing prices and rents, employing a new dataset covering the country’s administrative districts. In addition to conventional tests for β-convergence and σ-convergence, we apply Phillips and Sul’s (2007) approach to allow for heterogeneous transition dynamics across districts, potentially leading to different ‘convergence clubs’. Our results reveal no evidence of convergence across Germany or within states; instead, we discover widespread evidence of divergence and inter-state convergence, as well as support for the existence of convergence clubs. The results of an ordered logit model suggest that differences in the variation of GDP per capita, population density, unemployment rate, and shares of immigrants and asylum seekers have played a significant role in determining club membership from 2004 to 2020.

Using a survey experiment, we study whether showing German respondents a graph representing the European Central Bank’s inflation target alongside euro area inflation from 1999 to 2017 affects respondents’ trust in the ECB. On average, the treatment has no significant effect. However, it does increase trust in the ECB among respondents with no entrenched views, proxied by those who report no preference for any political party. Within this group, information about the actual path of the inflation rate, rather than information about the inflation target itself, appears to be the main driver of the treatment’s effect.

This study provides evidence of the causal impact of immigration on housing prices and rents using an extensive dataset from Germany that covers 382 administrative districts over the period 2004 − 2020. Employing a panel-data approach and a manually constructed Bartik instrument, we show that international migration has a significantly positive short-term effect on flat prices and rents. House prices are not significantly affected. We estimate that an increase in international migration of 1

Does a politician's sex influence political budget cycles (PBCs)? We answer this question using a sample of Spanish municipalities from the Madrid region for the period 2010-2019. The Madrid region has a homogenous set of budget rules that allow consistent categorization of budget expenditure items as either "mandatory" or "non-mandatory" public services. After differentiating between smaller and larger municipalities, gender influence is studied along two dimensions: the mayor's sex and the share of women in government. Our findings include, in regard to mandatory spending in smaller municipalities, that gender-balanced governments induce PBCs. In larger municipalities, when the share of women in government is above 60%, electoral spending is increased by up to 10% of an average municipal budget for mandatory spending, and up to 2.2% for non-mandatory. These findings are generally supported in a mixed-gender close election analysis.

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In this note, we study whether consumers actually monitor the inflation rate, an assumption that is often made in studies on inflation perceptions and expectations as well as policy analyses. We analyse this question using unique representative survey data on New Zealand collected in 2016. In this case of an inflation targeting country and an environment of low inflation rate, we find that only about one third of the population says that it monitors the inflation rate. These are people characterised by a significantly higher degree of objective and subjective economic knowledge as well as interest in monetary issues.

In recent decades, central banks have increasingly relied on communication alongside policy action. We review the current state of research on central bank communication and its impact on three important economic groups: financial market participants, consumers, and firms. On the one hand, studies focusing on financial market participants find that they pay close attention to central bank news and react quickly. Consumers and firms, on the other hand, are generally unaware of and uninterested in the conduct of monetary policy. Finally, we document research focusing on how policymakers can increase the public engagement with monetary policy.

This paper investigates the effect of information about cross-country ratings of the government's and the public's reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic on consumers' macroeconomic expectations and sentiment. We conduct consumer surveys with randomized control trials (RCTs) in two waves in Thailand and Vietnam. The information treatments have the strongest effect when the information shown contradicts consumers' prior beliefs. In the first survey, conducted when the first lockdown was eased, treatment effects are stronger in Vietnam, causing more optimistic expectations and sentiment. In the second survey, conducted at the start of the second wave of infections, treatment effects are stronger in Thailand, causing a more pessimistic outlook.

This study uses a narrative account of quarterly discretionary changes in tax liabilities from 1974Q4 to 2018Q2 in a VAR setting to examine whether legislative tax changes affect the trade balance in the US, Germany, and the UK. Six different types of legislative tax changes are considered, including indirect tax changes, personal income tax changes, and business tax changes. The results show that, in general, reductions in aggregated tax liabilities tend to reduce exports in the US and the UK, whereas imports tend to increase, leading to a fall in the net-exports-to-GDP ratio. However, this pattern does not necessarily hold for disaggregated tax changes. Moreover, the results for Germany differ from those for the US and the UK. Overall, the economic magnitude of the estimated effects of tax changes on trade variables is relatively small.

Using a randomized controlled trial in a 2018 survey of a representative sample of the German population, we study whether providing information about the European Central Bank’s (ECB) inflation record in comparison to its inflation target affects people’s trust in the central bank. In the treatment, administered to half of the roughly 2000 respondents, a graph of the annual inflation rate in the euro area from 1999 to 2017 and the ECB’s 2% inflation target was shown to respondents. We find that the treatment has, on average, no significant effect on the level of trust respondents have in the ECB or on the distribution of survey answers. However, the treatment increases trust in the ECB among respondents who report no preference for any political party. Within this group, the effect is strongest among those who reported biased beliefs about the inflation rate but knew that price stability is the ECB’s objective and those who reported a low level of subjective and objective knowledge about monetary policy.

To analyse the interdependence between monetary and fiscal policy during a financial crisis, we develop an open-economy DSGE model with monetary and fiscal policy as well as financial markets in a continuous-time framework based on stochastic differential equations. Monetary policy is modelled using both a standard and a modified Taylor rule and fiscal policy is modelled as either expansionary or austere. In addition, we differentiate between open economies and monetary union members. We find evidence that the modified Taylor rule notably reduces the likelihood that the financial market crisis affects the real economy. But if we assume that households are averse with respect to outstanding government debt, we find that a combination of expansionary monetary policy and austere fiscal policy provides better stabilisation of both domestic and foreign economies in terms of both output and inflation. In the case of a monetary union, we find that stabilisation of output in the country where the financial shock originates is no longer as easy and, in terms of prices, there is now deflation in the country where the crisis originated and a positive inflation rate in the other country.

This study provides evidence of the causal impact of immigration on German house prices, flat prices, and flat rents using an extensive dataset covering 382 administrative districts over the period 2004−2020. Employing a panel-data approach and a manually constructed past settlement instrument, we show that international migration has a significantly positive short-term effect on German flat prices and rents. House prices are not significantly affected. We estimate that an increase in international migration of 1% of the initial district population causes a hike in flat prices of up to 3% as well as a hike in flat rents of about 1%. The increase in flat prices is more than twice as high as this at the lower end of the market, whereas the flat rental market demonstrates a more linear response. We also discover that immigration’s impact on flat prices and rents does not significantly differ across rural and urban areas within the country.

To which degree can variation in sentiment-based indicators of central bank communication be attributed to changes in macroeconomic, financial, and monetary variables; idiosyncratic speaker effects; sentiment persistence; and random ‘noise’? Using the Loughran and McDonald (2011) dictionary on a text corpus containing more than 10,000 speeches and press statements, we construct sentiment-based indicators for the ECB and the Fed. An analysis of variance (ANOVA) shows that sentiment is strongly persistent and influenced by speaker-specific effects. With about 80% of the variation in sentiment being due to noise, our findings cast doubt on the reliability of conclusions based on variation in dictionary-based indicators.