This paper studies the effect of labor market reform on the welfare cost of business cycles. Motivated by the German labor market reforms of 2003-2005, the so-called Hartz reforms, the paper focuses on two labor market institutions: the unemployment insurance system determining search incentives...

We show that an otherwise standard one-sector real business cycle model with variable capital utilization and mild increasing returns-to-scale is able to generate qualitatively as well as quantitatively realistic aggregate fluctuations driven by news shocks to two formulations of future...

I add a moral hazard problem between banks and depositors as in Gertler and Karadi (2009) to a DSGE model with a costly state verification problem between entrepreneurs and banks as in Bernanke et al. (1999) (BGG). This modification amplifies the response of the external finance premium and the...

The standard two-sector monetary business cycle model suffers from an important deficiency. Since durable good prices are more flexible than non-durable good prices, optimising households build up the stock of durable goods at low cost after a monetary contraction. Consequently, sectoral outputs...

This paper studies optimal taxation in a general equilibrium macro model with endogenous entry. We compare the constant elasticity of substitution (CES) model to three alternative demand structures: oligopolistic competition in prices, oligopolistic competition in quantities, and translog...

Several frictions restrict the government s ability to tax assets. First of all, it is very costly to monitor trades on international asset markets. Moreover, agents can resort to non-observable low-return assets such as cash, gold or foreign currencies if taxes on observable assets become too...

Empirical studies show that job search behavior depends on the financial situation of the unemployed. Starting from this observation, we ask how unemployment insurance policy should take the individual financial situation into account. We use a quantitative model with a realistically calibrated...

We study optimal capital taxation in a dynamic Mirrleesian model with time-nonseparable preferences. The model covers the widely used cases of habit formation and durable consumption. Time-nonseparable preferences change labor supply incentives across time and thereby generate novel motives to...

The expanding/contracting behavior of monetary macroeconomic models is largely driven by government deficits. Their monetary effects on inflation and monetary growth determine the real value of money (or of government debt) in the long run. Only positive stationary (constant) real values of...

High public debt combined with low capacities of the state to raise taxes and to support markets can put even developed countries into turmoil. However, the existing political economy literature of state capacity, pioneered by Besley and Persson (2009), does not investigate the interaction of...