We study the dynamic impact of Covid-19, economic mobility, and containment policy shocks. We use Bayesian panel structural vector autoregressions with daily data for 44 countries, identified through sign and zero restrictions. Incidence and mobility shocks raise cases and deaths significantly...

To tackle mass unemployment and increase participation rates, the German government over recent years has mainly focused on supply side strategies, including 'making work pay' policies. The 2003 Mini-Job reform introduced an extended subsidy of social security contributions for low wage workers....

Parental leave and subsidized child care are prominent examples of family policies supporting the reconciliation of family life and labor market careers for mothers. In this paper, we combine different empirical strategies to evaluate the employment effects of these policies for mothers in...

Estimates of labour supply effects of recent UK reforms in the area of direct taxes and benefits show that policy can have significant influence on the level of employment. We confirm this in a simulation of in-work support system introduced into the German tax and benefit system. Our simulation...

Estimating labor supply functions using a discrete rather than a continuous specification has become increasingly popular in recent years. On basis of the German Socioeconomic Panel (GSOEP) I test which specification of discrete choice is the appropriate model for estimating labor supply: the...

Conditional on a contractionary monetary policy shock, the labor share of value added is expected to decrease in the basic New Keynesian model. By providing firm-level evidence, we are first to validate this proposition. Using local projections and high dimensional fixed effects, we show that a...

Expectations form the basis of economic decisions of market participants in an uncertain world. Sentiment indicators reflect those expectations and thus have a proven track record for predicting economic variables. However, respondents of surveys perceive the world to a large extent with the...

Before the World War I, the urban rental housing market in Germany could be described as a free and competitive market. The government hardly interfered in the relationships between the landlords and ten- ants. The rents were set freely. During the World War I, the market was hit by several...

Based on a panel of German professional forecasts for 1970 to 2003 we find that growth and inflation forecasts are unbiased and weakly, but not strongly efficient. Besides the effect of diverging forecasting dates, no other substantial differences in forecasting quality are found among...

The paper analyses the reasons for departures from strong rationality of German business cycle forecasts based on annual observations from 1963 to 2004. We rely on forecasts from the joint forecast of the so-called "six leading" forecasting institutions in Germany. We test for a non-linear...