Politicians travel extensively abroad, for various reasons. One purpose of external visits is to improve bilateral economic relations. In this paper, I examine the effect of state visits on international trade. I use a large data set covering the travel activities of the heads of state of...

This paper studies the long-run relationship between consumption, asset wealth and income in Germany, based on data from 1980 to 2003. While earlier studies mostly for the Anglo-Saxon economies have generally documented that departures of these three variables from their common trend signal...

Corporate tax reforms carried out in EU countries since 1980 entail lower statutory tax rates and reductions in generous tax depreciation provisions. Several countries including the UK have reduced tax rates for SMEs. This study compares incentive effects of such reforms on the SMEs’...

In this paper we test whether German public debt has been sustainable by resorting to a test proposed by Bohn (1998). We apply non-parametric and semi-parametric regressions with time depending coefficients. This test shows that the mean of the coefficient relevant for sustainability has been...

The German Income Tax Reform 2000, which announced a reduction in income tax rates to be implemented in a series of three stages, was welcomed by the public as a step towards unleashing lurking growth potentials. Nonetheless, in the course of the year 2001 a dispute arose, centering around the...

This article presents a systematic and extensive empirical study on the presence of Markov switching dynamics in three dollar-based exchange rates. A Monte Carlo approach is adopted to circumvent the statistical inference problem inherent to the test of regime-switching behavior. Two data...