The former EU president Jean-Claude Junker has proposed that all countries of the European Union should also adopt the euro as their currency and recent research has shown that countries currently pursuing this goal indeed fulfill the classical Optimal Currency Area (OCA) criterion of positively...

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...

In this paper we assess the information content of seven widely cited early indicators for the euro area with respect to forecasting area-wide industrial production. To this end, we use various tests that are designed to compare competing forecast models. In addition to the standard...

This paper is concerned with the apparent change in the U.S. oil price-macroeconomy relationship. It is investigated to what extent this change can be accounted for by the large oil price surges witnessed in the 1970s. The innovative approach of rolling impulse responses is applied and both the...

This paper studies how the HP-Filter should be adjusted, when changing the frequency of observations. It complements the results of Baxter and King (1999) with an analytical analysis, demonstrating that the filter parameter should be adjusted by multiplying it with the fourth power of the...

This paper is mainly concerned with the analysis of regional house price cycles. Based on a newly available data set consisting of the 40 largest U.S. Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs), we introduce a wavelet transform based metric to study the housing cycle synchronization across MSAs. We...

The recent plunge in oil prices has brought into question the generally accepted view that lower oil prices are good for the US and the global economy. In this paper, using a quarterly multi-country econometric model, we first show that a fall in oil prices tends relatively quickly to lower...

Using state-dependent local projection methods and historical U.S. data, we find that government spending multipliers are considerably larger in periods of private debt overhang. In particular, we find significant crowding-out of personal consumption and investment in low-debt states, resulting...

Uncertainty about the future course of the economy is a possible driver of aggregate fluctuations. To identify the different dimensions of uncertainty in the macroeconomy we construct a large dataset covering all types of economic uncertainty. We then identify two fundamental factors which...