Research

This paper studies how firms adjust to temporary infrastructure disruptions, using a period of exceptionally low water levels on European inland waterways as a natural experiment. Linking monthly trade and transport data for Germany, I show that firms relying on inland shipping for imports reduced the value, variety, and geographic scope of their exports. These effects were strongest among firms with limited transport diversification and cannot be explained by demand shocks or export constraints, highlighting the role of supply bottlenecks. Affected firms adapted by persistently switching to alternative transport modes, showing that even short-lived shocks can induce lasting behavioural change.

Coming soon. 

In this paper, we use a novel firm level dataset for Germany to investigate the effect of sanctions on export behaviour and performance of German firms. More specifically, we study the sanctions imposed by the EU against Russia in 2014 in response to the annexation of Crimea and Russia’s countermeasures. We find a substantial negative effect on both the extensive and intensive margin of German exports. While the negative effects are strongest for firms exporting products subject to trade restrictions, we provide further evidence on the indirect effects of sanctions. Analysing the impact on broader measures of firm performance, we document that the cost of sanctions is heterogeneous across firms but overall modest. Our results reveal that the negative impact of the shock was concentrated primarily among a small number of firms that were highly dependent on Russia as an export market and those directly affected by the sanctions. 

We make use of historical data on water levels on the Rhine river to analyze the impact of weather-related supply shocks on economic activity in Germany. Our analysis shows that low water levels lead to severe disruptions in inland water transportation and cause a significant and economically meaningful decrease of economic activity. In a month with 30 days of low water, industrial production in Germany declines by about 1 percent, ceteris paribus. Our analysis highlights the importance of extreme weather events for business cycle analysis and contributes to gauging the costs of extreme weather events in advanced economies.

Paper written during a traineeship at the ECB in 2017/2018 before my doctoral studies.

A large share of global trade being priced and invoiced primarily in U.S. dollar rather than the exporter's or the importer's currency has important implications for the transmission of shocks. We introduce this “dominant-currency pricing” (DCP) into ECB-Global, the ECB's macroeconomic model for the global economy. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to incorporate DCP into a major global macroeconomic model used at central banks or international organisations. In ECB-Global, DCP affects in particular the role of expenditure-switching and the U.S. dollar exchange rate for spillovers: In case of a shock in a non-U.S. economy that alters the value of its currency multilaterally, expenditure-switching occurs only through imports; in case of a U.S. shock that alters the value of the U.S. dollar multilaterally, expenditure-switching occurs both in non-U.S. economies’ imports and—as these are imports of their trading partners—exports. Overall, under DCP the U.S. dollar exchange rate is a major driver of global trade, even for transactions that do not involve the United States. To illustrate the usefulness of ECB-Global and DCP for policy analysis, we explore the implications of the euro rivalling the U.S. dollar as a second dominant currency in global trade. According to ECB-Global, in such a scenario the global spillovers from U.S. shocks are smaller, whereas those from euro area shocks are amplified; domestic euro area monetary policy effectiveness is hardly affected by the euro becoming a second globally dominant currency in trade. 

Paper based on my master's thesis.

We analyze whether landlocked regions are systematically poorer, using panel data for 1527 regions in 83 nations from 1950 to 2014 and exploiting within-country-time variation. Lacking ocean access decreases regional GDP/capita by ≈ 13%. Specifically, coastal distance matters but not the length of coastline. Exploring moderators, national political institutions appear irrelevant while increasing international trade and manufacturing intensifies the landlockedness curse within the same country and year. However, transport-related infrastructure may be able to alleviate these disadvantages. 

Paper based on a seminar paper from my master's.

Empirical findings of a negative association between female participation in politics and the labor market, and levels of corruption have received great attention. We reproduce this correlation for 177 countries from 1998 to 2014. However, once taking account of country-specific heterogeneity via fixed effects, these negative associations disappear, both in terms of statistical significance and magnitude. This suggests that female participation rates in politics and the labor market are not directly linked to lower corruption. Exploiting country-specific dimensions of culture, we then present evidence from pooled estimations suggesting that power distance and masculinity are systematically associated with both corruption and female participation rates. In fact, these two cultural characteristics are sufficient to fully explain the link between gender and corruption. Therefore, culture is an important dimension to consider when analyzing the relationship between female participation in society and corruption since the omission of cultural characteristics can produce a spurious correlation between increased female participation rates alone and reduced corruption levels.