This paper analyzes the heterogeneous effects of monetary policy on workers with differing levels of labor force attachment. Exploiting variation in labor market tightness across metropolitan areas, we show that the employment of populations with lower labor force attachment—Blacks, high...

This paper empirically studies the impact of the quality of political institutions on the link between central bank independence and inflation. Making use of data on the evolution of central bank independence over time and controlling for possible nonlinearities, we employ interaction models to...

On 3 June 2020, the German government announced a temporary value added tax (VAT) rate reduction. VAT rates were reduced on 1 July 2020 and went back to their previous level on 1 January 2021. We study the price effects of the temporary VAT rate reduction using a web-scraped data set covering...

The value-added tax is one of the most important tax revenue sources in many countries. However, it is sometimes considered unfair as it ultimately hits consumption, and poorer households spend a greater share of their income on consumption. But this depends on whether, and to what degree, the...

This paper provides insights into the time-varying dynamics of the German business cycle over the last five decades. To do so, I employ an open-economy time-varying parameter VAR with stochastic volatility, which I estimate by quasi-Bayesian techniques. The reduced-form analysis reveals...

We provide a comprehensive analysis of income inequality and income dynamics for Germany over the last two decades. Combining personal income tax and social security data allows us — for the first time — to offer a complete picture of the distribution of annual earnings in Germany. We find...

Using firm-level survey data from Germany, this paper asks how do supply constraints propagate monetary policy shocks? To answer this question, we first offer a general discussion on the measurement of supply constraints. We show that capacity utilization, a widely accepted measure of...

We analyze the effectiveness of the German tax reduction on fuel prices (‘Tankrabatt’) that was introduced for three months, starting on 1 June 2022. Using the synthetic control method to compare actual prices of gasoline and diesel to those in a counterfactual situation without the tax...

This brief exposition suggests that the Federal Reserve System temporarily guarantee a lower bound on stock prices in order to escape the current combination of liquidity trap and credit crunch. It shortly discusses reasons for this measure, consequences, and some alternatives. It is meant as a...

We consider optimal monetary policy in a model that integrates credit frictions in the standard New Keynesian model with sticky prices and wages as well as adjustment costs of capital. Different from traditional models with credit frictions such as Carlstrom and Fuerst (1998), the model is able...