We develop an asset pricing model with heterogeneous exposure to a persistent world growth factor to identify global growth and financial shocks in a multicountry panel VAR in volatility and output growth. The econometric estimates yield three sets of empirical results about (1) the importance of global growth for the interpretation of the correlation between volatility and growth over the business cycle and the possible presence of omitted variable bias in single-country VAR studies, (2) the extent to which output shocks drive volatility, and (3) the transmission of volatility shocks to output growth.

We study how capital flows affects German cities’ GDP growth depending on the state of their real estate markets. Identification exploits a policy framework assigning refugees to cities on a quasi-random basis and variation in nondevelopable area for the construction of an exposure measure to real estate market tightness. We estimate that the most exposed cities to real estate market tightness grew at least 1.9 percentage points more than the least exposed ones, cumulatively, from 2009 to 2014. Capital inflows shift credit to firms with more collateral, which leads firms to hire and invest more in response to these shocks.