Night lights could be a valuable proxy of economic activity at the subnational level when GDP data are lacking or of poor quality. Supplementing Henderson et al.’s (2012) analysis at the national level, we assess the stability of the elasticity of GDP with regard to night lights across regions...

This study examines 147 banking crises in the period of 1976-2011 documented by the International Monetary Fund. The countries affected by crises are analysed in respect of publicly available World Bank indicators in the periods of three years before the crises. Machine learning methodology for...

Much analysis in macroeconomics empirically addresses economy-wide incentives behind consumer/investment choices by using insights from the way a single representative household would behave. Heterogeneity at the micro level can jeopardize attempts to back up the representative consumer...

The paradox of monetary profits has been a recurrent theme in macroeconomics since the problem was first formulated by Marx. Capitalists as a whole can at most get from workers, what they already paid out in wages. Marx did not solve this problem, and neither did Keynes, who had to face the...

Empirical data indicate that firms tend to have below-average productivity upon entry and that they tend to experience post-entry productivity growth. I present a New Keynesian model with growth in firm-specific productivity and firm turnover that captures these two phenomena. The model predicts...

Using data from the India Human Development Survey, this paper analyses the relationship between child disability and maternal work participation for India. The authors' findings suggest a significant positive relationship between child disability and the work participation of the urban mothers...

This paper is based on my thesis from the year 2008. It uses the German Microcensus (MC) to study the effects of continuing vocational training (CVT) on employment, the risk of unemployment, and wages. To control for education, profession and heterogeneity in the sectors and industrial branches...

This paper studies the role of labor market institutions in business cycle fluctuations. We develop a DSGE model with search and matching frictions and incorporate a US unemployment insurance experience rating system. Layoff taxes based on experience rating finance the cost of unemployment...

The standard search model of unemployment predicts, under plausible assumptions about household preferences, that disembodied technological progress leads to higher unemployment. This prediction is at odds with the experience of industrialized countries in the 1970s. This paper shows that...

Whereas microeconomic studies point to pronounced downward rigidity of nominal wages in the US economy, the standard Phillips curve neglects such a feature. Using a stochastic frontier model we find macroeconomic evidence of a strictly nonnegative error in an otherwise standard Phillips curve in...