The trend of increasing inequality in the distribution of income and wealth in most developed countries has led to calls for corrective tax increases for the rich and wealthy. Such calls are often confronted with the claim that higher taxes on top personal incomes, corporate income and wealth...

We analyze whether there are negative (positive) long-term effects of austerity measures (stimulus measures) on potential output growth. Based on the approach of Blanchard and Leigh (2013) and Fatás and Summers (2016) and using a novel dataset of narratively identified fiscal policy shocks, we...

I estimate fiscal reaction functions to analyze the cyclical behavior of discretionary measures in the euro area and the potential impact of changes in the fiscal framework. The core is to analyze whether fiscal rules have an asymmetric impact on discretionary measures over the cycle. First,...

Using the bottom-up approach of Romer and Romer (2010), we construct a rich narrative dataset of net-revenue fiscal shocks for Germany by reconstructing and extending the tax shock series of Hayo and Uhl (2014) and coding a shock series for social security contributions, benefits and transfers....

Exploiting official historical records of the German Bundestag and Bundesrat, the Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs and the German statutory pension insurance scheme, we construct a narrative of legislated social security changes for Germany between 1970 and 2013 in order to identify...

Nach Berechnungen des DIW Berlin ist das Bruttoinlandsprodukt im Euroraum im ersten Quartal 2002 um 0,3 % gestiegen; dies entspricht einer laufenden Jahresrate von 1,2 %. Damit scheint die konjunkturelle Schwäche vom vergangenen Jahr allmählich abzuklingen. Die leichte Erholung ist vor allem...

Spaniens überdurchschnittlich hohes Wachstum in den vergangenen Jahren darf nicht darüber hinwegtäuschen, dass die Wirtschaftspolitik noch erhebliche strukturelle Probleme lösen muss. Die beeindruckende binnenwirtschaftliche Expansion ist in erster Linie das Ergebnis der für Spanien stark...

In this article an overview of the German macroeconomic performance in the last decade is stressed; extraordinary recovery of the German productivity and successes of the foreign trade face depressed domestic demand and a still worrying situation in the labour market. This article attempts to...

In this paper we present a methodology which can help to improve the assessment of the current economic situation. We propose an approach which combines multivariate single equations to forecast the monthly growth rate of industrial production with a density forecast. This allows to estimate the...

The NAIRU is a key component of potential output and as such critically affects output gap estimates. In May 2014, the European Commission changed its specification of the NAIRU for several countries and lowered its NAIRU estimates - in the case of Spain from 26.6% to 20.7% for 2015. To test the...