Germany is the laggard of Europe, yet the country is world champion in merchandise exports. The paper tries to solve this theoretical and empirical puzzle by diagnosing a "pathological export boom" and a "bazaar effect". Excessively high wages defended by unions and the welfare state against the...

Business cycle indicators are used to assess the economic situation of countries or regions. They are closely watched by the public, but are not easy to interpret. Does a current movement of the indicator signal a turning point or not? With the help of Markov Switching Models movements of...

The Ifo Business Climate is the most important indicator for the business cycle in Germany. In 1993 the connection between the two components of the business climate - business situation and business expectations - was graphically portrayed by Ifo in a 4-quadrant scheme: the Ifo Business Cycle...

Income inequality in Germany has been continuously increasing during the past 20 years. In general, this is understood as an increase in inequality of wages due to changes in bargaining power of employees. However, the role of changing household structure is widely neglected. Societal trends...

The distributional consequences of the recent economic crisis are still broadly unknown. While it is possible to speculate which groups are likely to be hardest-hit, detailed distributional studies are still largely backward-looking due to a lack of real-time microdata. This paper studies the...

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...

As shown in Sinn and Wollmershäuser (2012a), during the European balance-of-payments crisis, inter-governmental credit and Target credit granted by core-country central banks have replaced private international capital flows in financing the crisis countries' current account deficits, and even...

Business climate indicators are used to receive early signals for turning points in the general business cycle. Therefore methods for the detection of turning points in time series are required. Estimations of slopes of a smooth component in the data can be calculated with local polynomial...

During the next decades the populations of most developed countries will grow older as a result of the low level of birth rates since the 1970s and/or the continuously increasing life expectancy. We show within a Generational Accounting framework how unsustainable the public finances of France,...

Despite massive digitization efforts, the German economy has experienced a marked slowdown in its productivity growth. This paper analyzes the reasons behind this disconcerting development. A major factor is the turnaround of the labor market that commenced around 2005. The successful...