Housing shortages and rising rents have become a source of political pressure in many countries, prompting calls for stronger intervention in rental markets. This column shows that the effects of such...

In many Germanic languages, the word for ‘debt’ also means ‘guilt’. This column explores whether the linguistic overlap leads to greater debt aversion in Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland. Using a guilt-laden term reduces willingness to borrow, lowers approval for government debt, and influences firms’ financing plans and politicians’ framing of fiscal policy. While support for public debt goes down with use of the laden term, the effect disappears when the purpose of the debt is clear. Linguistic framing may help guide borrowing toward socially optimal levels.

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We conduct a survey experiment among 18,000 respondents in Germany to examine the determinants of support for rent control policies. We find that highlighting undesirable price and supply effects low....

What is their love of working from home doing to their economies?

This paper examines the effects of real estate transfer taxes (RETT) on property prices using a rich micro dataset of roughly 17 million German proper…

This paper develops a decomposition framework to study the importance of different stabilization channels of an unemployment re-insurance scheme for t…

Most German companies expect productivity to remain the same should their employees return from hybrid working to working solely in the office: 60.1% believe that employee productivity will remain the...

Als Maßnahme in der Corona-Pandemie ist es geblieben und für viele Arbeitnehmende gar nicht mehr wegzudenken: das Homeoffice. Nun schaltet sich Textilunternehmer und Trigema-Chef Wolfgang Grupp in d...