Current projects
For information about my on-going projects in the climate-finance area, see the pages of the ISQD group.
Working papers:
Banking on Snow: Bank Capital, Risk and Employment, 2023, with Simon Baumgartner, Thomas Schober and Rudolf Winter-Ebmer.
This paper analyzes how small-firm employment responds to labor productivity risk. We use highly granular data about firms employing workers whose productivity depends on the weather. This allows us to analyze the effects of exogenous fluctuations in labor productivity risk, induced by weather risk. We find that the risk reduces the firms' employment, with a stronger effect on the firms in locations where the regional banks have relatively little equity capital. We also find that, in these locations, the banks' borrowers receive less liquidity from their banks if the locations are subject to adverse weather shocks. It appears that bank capitalization affects small firms' capacity to take labor productivit risk by changing their access to liquidity "insurance". Well-capitalized banks support economic adaptation to weather-induced labor productivity risk.
The
stability of dividends and wages: Effects of competitor
inflexibility, 2020, with Daniel Rettl and Josef
Zechner.
We analyze how industry-wide risks are shared between
firms' employees and their owners. Focusing on the
electricity generation industry, we study firms which are
subject to similar risks but use different production
technologies. We document that firms are more exposed to
industry shocks when their competitors use lower-cost
production technologies, since this mitigates their response
to negative demand shocks. This "competitor inflexibility"
destabilizes payouts to equityholders, but there is no
evidence that it compromises wage stability. Firms do not
share systematic risk due to competitor inflexibility with
their employees and set wages as if their shareholders' risk
preferences were given.