aims to create better foundations for the evaluation of policy measures, including the effects of regional policies. research based on firm - level information on subsidies shows that such subsidies support the creation of new employment while the productivity of the recipient firms remains largely unaffected for the time span covered by the data. [ 8 ] of course, this is only one of the many examples of how research institutes in germany contribute to evidence - based policymaking. moving on to the national level, the 2018 coalition agreement foresees an evaluation of policy measures in a wide range of areas such as integration in schools, [UNK] laws and fines, cultural policy, an initiative to promote healthy diets and increased physical activity, programs to prevent political extremism, as well as data protection regulation. [ 9 ] an important step towards operationalising policy evaluation and making it part of the policy process has been made by an initiative of the national regulatory control council ( normenkontrollrat ) : since march 2013, all national policy measures with annual implementation costs of more than € 1 million must be subject to ex post evaluation. these evaluations are reviewed by the council. implementing these initiatives requires an active exchange between the fields of academia and policymaking, learning and experimenting. in order to promote this dialogue, the german national academy of sciences “ leopoldina ” has established an initiative for evidence - based policy. [ 11 ] it aims to improve the transparency of political processes and to establish common standards on how policy measures should be evaluated. the initiative builds on an exchange of views between academia, administration, the media, and the political sphere through workshops, joint events, and ( informal ) networks. another example of evidence - based policy comes from the international level : in 2017, the g20 endorsed a framework for the ex post evaluation of financial sector reforms. [ 12 ] in response to the global financial crisis, the g20 leaders agreed on a package of financial sector reforms with four elements : increasing resilience through higher capital requirements for banks, new regimes for the resolution of large and systemic banks, reforms of derivative markets, and improved monitoring and regulation of shadow banking. the objective of the evaluation framework is to attribute outcomes of reforms, to identify relevant heterogeneities with regard to reform effects, and to study broader, general equilibrium effects. first evaluations have already been conducted. they find that, by and large, the reforms are working as intended and do not have major side effects. in an ongoing evaluation project, the fsb members

between 1995 and 2000, the price - earnings ratio of the s & p 500 rose from 15 to nearly 30. however, to attribute that increase entirely to revised earnings expectations would require an upward revision to the growth of real earnings of 2 full percentage points in perpetuity. 3 because the real riskless rate of return apparently did not change much during that five - year period, anything short of such an extraordinary permanent increase in the growth of structural productivity, and thus earnings, 4 implies a significant fall in real equity premiums in those years. if all of the drop in equity premiums had resulted from a permanent reduction in cyclical volatility, stock prices arguably could have stabilized at their levels in the summer of 2000. that clearly did not happen, indicating that stock prices, in fact, had risen to levels in excess of any economically supportable base. toward the end of that year, expectations for long - term earnings growth began to turn down. at about the same time, equity premiums apparently began to rise. the consequent reversal in stock prices that has occurred over the past couple of years has been particularly pronounced in the high - tech sectors of the economy. the investment boom in the late 1990s, initially spurred by significant advances in information technology, ultimately produced an overhang of installed capacity. even though demand for a number of high - tech products was doubling or tripling annually, in many cases new supply was coming on even faster. overall, capacity in high - tech manufacturing industries rose more than 40 percent in 2000, well in excess of its rapid rate of increase over the previous two years. in light of the burgeoning supply, the pace of increased demand for the newer technologies, though rapid, fell short of that needed to sustain the elevated real rate of return for the whole of the high - tech capital stock. returns on the securities of high - tech firms ultimately collapsed, as did capital investment. similar, though less severe, adjustments were occurring in many industries across our economy. some decline in equity premiums in the latter part of the 1990s almost surely would have been anticipated as the continuing absence of any business correction reinforced notions of increased secular stability. in such an environment, the relatively mild recession that we experienced in 2001 might still have been expected to leave equity premiums below their long - term averages. that apparently has not been the case, as the tendency toward lower equity premiums created by a more stable economy may have been offset to some extent recently by concerns