Inventory fluctuations are an important phenomenon in business cycles. However, the preliminary data on inventory investment as published in the German national accounts are tremendously prone to revision and therefore ill-equipped to diagnose the current stance of the inventory cycle. The Ifo...

Inflation differentials in the Euro area are mainly due to a sustained divergence of wage developments across the Euro area, and narrower differences in labour productivity growth (Alvarez et al., 2006). We investigate convergence of inflation using unit labour cost (ULC) growth and applying...

The choice between foreign direct investment (FDI) and exports has been a recurrent theme in the literature on international trade, yet few studies have analysed this choice at the level of the individual firm. This paper uses a new dataset to study the FDI-versus-exports decision for banks. We...

The presence of other firms in a foreign market can have a double-edged effect on the profitability of new entrants. Firstly, a larger presence of other firms implies more competition and thus lowers the earnings prospects of new entrants. Secondly, there might be positive spill-over effects...

Globalization has effected business cycle developments in OECD countries and has increased activities of firms across national borders. This paper analyzes whether these two developments are linked. We use a new firm-level dataset on the foreign activities of German firms to test whether foreign...

This paper provides new evidence on the foreign direct investment stocks of German firms. We use firm-level data for the years 1990-2000 to describe the regional and sectoral patterns of German FDI through gravity-type equations. We provide evidence on the patterns of FDI by sector, by size of...

The paper presents empirical work on short-run and long-run comovement between the German, French and Italian aggregates of private consumption, business investment, exports, imports, GDP, and changes in inventories. In country-specific data sets, cointegration analyses are carried out both to...