Women work much more in the US than in Germany and most other EU economies. We find that the US-German employment gap is not strongly related to cross-country differences in the level of pay or social benefits. The difference in employment is due to the different marketization of activities...

This paper was prepared as a Keynote Address for the ESRC Conference on the Future of Macroeconomics held at the Bank of England Conference Center on April 14, 2000. It uses the empirical framework for formulating and estimating forward looking monetary policy rules developed in Clarida, Gali,...

Is the expansion of jobs in low-wage services in Europe restricted by high wages? With services now the main sector source of employment growth this question becomes crucial and we examine it through a detailed comparison of the role of low-wage services in the US and Germany. We find a clear...

Germany's more compressed wage structure is taken by many analysts as the main cause of the German-US difference in job creation. We find that the US has a more dispersed level of skills than Germany but even adjusted for skills, Germany has a more compressed wage distribution than the US. The...

Greater job creation in the US than in Germany has often been related to greater wage dispersion coupled with less regulated labour and product markets in the US. Based on the Comparative German American Structural Database and the International Adult Literacy Survey we find that employment of...

This paper implements a novel empirical approach for estimating the importance of structural factors in explaining the recent behavior of G3 current account positions. Following the contribution of Sims (1982), we employ a tractable econometric framework that can be used to answer the following...

This paper reports estimates of monetary policy reaction functions for two sets of" countries: the G3 (Germany, Japan, and the U.S.) and the E3 (UK, France that since 1979 each of the G3 central banks has pursued an implicit form of inflation targeting which may account for the broad success of...

This paper analyzes German monetary policy in the post-Bretton Woods era. Despite the public focus on monetary targeting, in practice, German monetary policy involves the management of short term interest rates, as it does in the United States. Except during the mid to late 1970s, the Bundesbank...