Tim Eisert

• Inflation and floating-rate loans: Evidence from the Euro Area

(with Fabrizio Core, Filippo De Marco, and Glenn Schepens)

We provide novel evidence on how monetary policy affects inflation through the floating rate channel. Using euro-area corporate loan data from 2021 to 2023, we find that the short-run impact of monetary tightening on inflation is 50% smaller in markets dominated by floating-rate loans. Firms with floating-rate loans keep prices elevated to offset higher borrowing costs, thereby reducing the effectiveness of monetary policy tightening. This effect is stronger in concentrated, high mark-up markets, where firms can more easily pass on higher prices to their customers, as well as in markets with highly leveraged or illiquid firms. Since firms with floating-rate loans face an increase in their financial burden, their loan terms are more frequently renegotiated, often resulting in reduced spreads and a shift from floating to fixed rates. The varying prevalence of floating-rate loans helps explain the heterogeneity in monetary policy transmission within the euro-area, as floating rate contracts are more prevalent in peripheral countries, whereas fixed rates contracts are more common in core countries.

• How do supply shocks to inflation generalize? Evidence from the pandemic era in Europe 

Covered in Financial Times, VoxEU

(with Viral V. Acharya, Matteo Crosignani, and Christian Eufinger)

We document how supply-chain pressures, household inflation expectations, and firm pricing power interacted to induce the pandemic-era surge in consumer price inflation in the euro area. Initially, supply-chain pressures increased inflation through a cost-push channel and raised inflation expectations. Subsequently, the cost-push channel intensified as firms with high pricing power increased product markups in sectors witnessing high demand.  Eventually, even though supply-chain pressures eased, these firms were able to further increase markups due to stickiness of inflation expectations. The resulting persistent impact on inflation suggests supply-side impulses can generalize, via an interaction of household expectations and firm pricing power, into broad-based inflation.

• The Manager - Shareholder Agency Conflict: Do Banks Prefer Non-Alignment?

(with Christian Hirsch)

Working Paper on SSRN

This paper studies the link between the agency costs of equity and the agency costs of debt. Using a unique sample of the ownership structure of single and dual class firms as well as hand-collected data on loan contracts, we find that the agency cost of debt – proxied by various loan contracts terms - increases in the voting power of the largest outside shareholder, our primary measure of the agency cost of equity. We provide evidence that these results are consistent with debt holders being concerned about the high risk-shifting incentives of equity holders.