In the current debate on the reasons and implications of the Greek and Irish euro crisis, the intra-European current account imbalances have gained rising attention. Whereas Greece and Ireland struggle for austerity in private and public spending, Germany is urged to reduce its current account...

When did Germany become economically integrated? Within the framework of a gravity model, based on a new data set of about 40,000 observations on trade flows within and across the borders of Germany over the period 1885 - 1933, I explore the geography of trade costs across Central Europe. There...

This paper deals with the effects of labour market institutions on unemployment in a panel of 19 OECD countries for the period 1960 to 2003 In contrast to many other studies, we use long time series and analyze cyclically adjusted trend values of the unemployment rate. Our novel contribution is...

This paper analyzes the strikingly different response of unemployment to the Great Recession in France and Spain. Their labor market institutions are similar and their unemployment rates just before the crisis were both around 8%. Yet, in France, unemployment rate has increased by 2 percentage...

The theory of optimal currency areas states that a currency union may succeed if the participating countries have complementary industry structures. If this is not the case a currency union does not, inevitably, have to fail because market forces will induce adjustments of the industry...

This paper applies the Phillips and Sul (2007) method to test for convergence in stock returns to an extensive dataset including monthly stock price indices for five EU countries (Germany, France, the Netherlands, Ireland and the UK) as well as the US over the period 1973-2008. We carry out the...

The use of large datasets for macroeconomic forecasting has received a great deal of interest recently. Boosting is one possible method of using high-dimensional data for this purpose. It is a stage-wise additive modelling procedure, which, in a linear specification, becomes a variable selection...

By using a model of trade union behaviour Grüner (2010) argues that the introduction of the European Monetary Union (EMU) led to lower wage growth and lower unemployment in participating countries. Following Grüner's model, monetary centralization lets the central bank react less flexibly to...

We analyze different options for the design of a common unemployment insurance system for the euro area (EA). We assess their effectiveness to act as an insurance device in the presence of asymmetric macroeconomic shocks. Running counterfactual simulations based on micro data for the period...

German policy during the Eurozone crisis supposedly follows an ordoliberal tradition. In this paper, we discuss to what extent this contention holds and to what extent Germany pragmatically responded to different crisis phenomena. A proper analysis of ordoliberal thinking reveals that the...