The current economic crisis requires fast information to predict economic behavior early, which is difficult at times of structural changes. This paper suggests an innovative new method of using data on internet activity for that purpose. It demonstrates strong correlations between keyword...

This paper establishes stylized facts about the cyclicality of real consumer wages and real producer wages in Germany. As detrending methods we apply the deterministic trend model, the Beveridge-Nelson decomposition, the Hodrick-Prescott filter, the Baxter-King filter and the structural time...

This paper provides an empirical analysis on the determination of wages at the sectoral level in main industrial economies. Nominal wages are bargained between labour unions and employers in imperfect competitive markets, where spillovers across sectors might occur. Using a principal component...

Competitiveness differentials are blamed for the instability of the Eurozone. Most of the analyses focus on labour costs or labour-market institutions. This paper explores an additional source of differentials in competitiveness: land and building prices. European countries, especially France,...

We show that the behaviour of the real exchange rates of the UK, Germany, France and Japan has been characterized by structural breaks, which changed the adjustment mechanism. In the context of a Time-Varying Smooth Transition Autoregression (TV-STAR) of the kind introduced by Lundbergh et al....

Conventional theory predicts that productivity gains lead to pay hikes. Pay increases, however, can influence labor productivity. But what about in a corporatist economy? Focusing on Germany, we use an innovative technique developed by Geweke to disentangle the relationship between pay and...

This contribution investigates whether working time accounts are beneficial for the performance of German establishments. Based on the representative German Establishment Panel of the Institute for Employment Research during the period 2008-2013, effects on productivity, wages, sales, firm size,...