IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/dar/wpaper/145780.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Retained earnings, foreign portfolio ownership, and the German current account: A firm-level approach

Author

Listed:
  • Goldbach, Stefan
  • Harms, Philipp
  • Jochem, Axel
  • Nitsch, Volker
  • Weichenrieder, Alfons J.

Abstract

In some countries, a sizable fraction of savings is derived from corporate savings. Although larger, traded corporations are often co-owned by foreign portfolio investors, current international accounting standards allocate all corporate savings to the host country. This paper suggests a framework to correct for this misleading attribution and applies this concept to Germany. For the years 2012 to 2020, our corrections retrospectively reduce German savings and consequently the German current account surplus by, on average, €11.5bn annually. This amounts to lowering Germany’s average official current account surplus (€226.6bn) across these years by approximately five percent.

Suggested Citation

  • Goldbach, Stefan & Harms, Philipp & Jochem, Axel & Nitsch, Volker & Weichenrieder, Alfons J., 2024. "Retained earnings, foreign portfolio ownership, and the German current account: A firm-level approach," Publications of Darmstadt Technical University, Institute for Business Studies (BWL) 145780, Darmstadt Technical University, Department of Business Administration, Economics and Law, Institute for Business Studies (BWL).
    • Handle: RePEc:dar:wpaper:145780
    Note: for complete metadata visit http://tubiblio.ulb.tu-darmstadt.de/145780/
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://tuprints.ulb.tu-darmstadt.de/27468
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Bach, Stefan & Bartels, Charlotte & Neef, Theresa, 2024. "The distribution of national income in Germany, 1992-2019," IWH Discussion Papers 25/2024, Halle Institute for Economic Research (IWH).

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • F32 - International Economics - - International Finance - - - Current Account Adjustment; Short-term Capital Movements
    • E21 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Consumption; Saving; Wealth

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:dar:wpaper:145780. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Dekanatssekretariat (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ivthdde.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.