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    <title>EconStor Collection:</title>
    <link>https://hdl.handle.net/10419/223181</link>
    <description />
    <pubDate>Wed, 29 Apr 2026 02:48:03 GMT</pubDate>
    <dc:date>2026-04-29T02:48:03Z</dc:date>
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      <title>The fate of the passbook: Why it vanished in the US but survived in Germany during the stagflation period (1966-1983)</title>
      <link>https://hdl.handle.net/10419/301873</link>
      <description>Title: The fate of the passbook: Why it vanished in the US but survived in Germany during the stagflation period (1966-1983)
Authors: Knake, Sebastian
Abstract: In his article, Sebastian Knake challenges the general assumption that traditional savings accounts in the US disappeared naturally as a result of the combination of interest rate regulation and extraordinarily high market interest rates during the stagflation period. By comparing the US experience with simultaneous developments in West Germany, he finds that the opportunity costs of owning a regular passbook were comparable in both countries. In contrast to the US case, however, the passbook remained a cornerstone of household saving in Germany. Drawing upon research in several bank archives in the US and Germany, Knake explains these divergent developments in terms of fundamental differences in how banks and their customers communicated over prices. In the US, a peculiar combination of regulative rules forced banks, and especially savings institutions, to aggressively promote new types of bank accounts that were introduced by federal regulation authorities, thereby increasing nominal interest rate expectations. In Germany, by contrast, banks confined information about advantageous investment opportunities to the smallest possible share of the customer base. These divergent communication strategies reflect a difference in the balance of power in the bank-customer relationship. German customers depended on their primary-and in most cases only-bank relationship to acquire information on alternative investments, while US customers could draw on several relationships with banks and savings institutions to obtain the relevant information. Thus, the fate of the passbook was sealed by the ability or inability of banks to keep their customers in the dark about the real opportunity costs of passbook saving.</description>
      <pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <guid isPermaLink="false">https://hdl.handle.net/10419/301873</guid>
      <dc:date>2024-01-01T00:00:00Z</dc:date>
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      <title>Inefficient forecast narratives: A BERT-based approach</title>
      <link>https://hdl.handle.net/10419/300847</link>
      <description>Title: Inefficient forecast narratives: A BERT-based approach
Authors: Foltas, Alexander
Abstract: I contribute to previous research on the efficient integration of forecasters' narratives into business cycle forecasts. Using a Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model, I quantify 19,300 paragraphs from German business cycle reports (1998-2021) and classify the signs of institutes' consumption forecast errors. The correlation is strong for 12.8% of paragraphs with a predicted class probability of 85% or higher. Reviewing 150 of such high-probability paragraphs reveals recurring narratives. Underestimations of consumption growth often mention rising employment, increasing wages and transfer payments, low inflation, decreasing taxes, crisis-related fiscal support, and reduced relevance of marginal employment. Conversely, overestimated consumption forecasts present opposing narratives. Forecasters appear to particularly underestimate these factors when they disproportionately affect low-income households.</description>
      <pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <guid isPermaLink="false">https://hdl.handle.net/10419/300847</guid>
      <dc:date>2024-01-01T00:00:00Z</dc:date>
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      <title>Eliciting expectation uncertainty from private households</title>
      <link>https://hdl.handle.net/10419/268639</link>
      <description>Title: Eliciting expectation uncertainty from private households
Authors: Dovern, Jonas
Abstract: Recently, much attention has been devoted to the measurement of macroeconomic (expectation) uncertainty and its impact on aggregate economic fuctuations. This paper presents a new qualitative measure of macroeconomic expectation uncertainty based on data from a German online survey of consumer expectations. I document that the survey design works well. Elicited expectation uncertainty is related to data volatility and conventional measures of uncertainty as expected. Its dependency on socioeconomic factors is in line with previous evidence based on quantitative uncertainty measures. The new measure ofers a very efcient way of eliciting expectation uncertainty and can be used to obtain uncertainty measures on many diferent expectations at low cost.</description>
      <pubDate>Sun, 01 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <guid isPermaLink="false">https://hdl.handle.net/10419/268639</guid>
      <dc:date>2023-01-01T00:00:00Z</dc:date>
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    <item>
      <title>Testing for differences in survey-based density expectations: A compositional data approach</title>
      <link>https://hdl.handle.net/10419/268640</link>
      <description>Title: Testing for differences in survey-based density expectations: A compositional data approach
Authors: Dovern, Jonas; Glas, Alexander; Kenny, Geoff
Abstract: We propose to treat survey-based density expectations as compositional data when testing either for heterogeneity in density forecasts across different groups of agents or for changes over time. Monte Carlo simulations show that the proposed test has more power relative to both a bootstrap approach based on the KLIC and an approach which involves multiple testing for differences of individual parts of the density. In addition, the test is computaionally much faster than the KLIC-based one, which relies on simulations, and allows for comparisons across multiple groups. Using density expectations from the ECB Survey of Professional Forecasters and the U.S. Survey of Consumer Expectations, we show the usefulness of the test in detecting possible changes in density expectations over time and across different types of forecasters.</description>
      <pubDate>Sun, 01 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <guid isPermaLink="false">https://hdl.handle.net/10419/268640</guid>
      <dc:date>2023-01-01T00:00:00Z</dc:date>
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