We analyze the international transmission of financial stress and its effects on economic activity. We construct country specific monthly financial stress indexes (FSI) using dynamic factor models from 1970 until 2012 for 20 countries. We show that there is a strong co-movement of the FSI during...

This paper analyzes the effects of short-time work (i.e., government subsidized working time reductions) on unemployment and output fluctuations. The central question is whether the rule based component (i.e., the existence of the institution short-time work) and the discretionary component...

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 offers a reappraisal of the inflation-unemployment tradeoff, based on ?frictional growth,? describing the interplay between nominal frictions and money growth. When the money supply grows in the presence of price inertia (due to staggered wage contracts with time discounting), the...

This paper has two sources: One is my own research in three broad areas: business cycles, economic measurement and social choice. In all of these fields I attempted to apply the basic precepts of the scientific method as it is understood in the natural sciences. I found that my effort at using...

We study the Beaudry and Portier (2006)-hypothesis of delayed-technology diffusion and newsdriven business cycles. For German data on TFP and stock prices we find qualitatively similar empirical evidence. Quantitatively, however, an impulse response analysis suggests that a substantial part of...

This paper analyzes the impacts of news shocks on macroeconomic volatility. Whereas anticipation amplifies volatility in any purely forward-looking model, such as the baseline New Keynesian model, the results are ambiguous when including a backward-looking component. In addition to these...

This paper studies the leadlag pattern in the interaction between credit and growth cycles of India at three levels i.e. at the aggregate level for annual GDP growth, at the sectoral level across agriculture, industry and services, and also across major industries. The study focuses on three...