Using aggregate data, the paper analyzes the importance of inventory investment for German business cycles since 1960. In contrast to U.S. experience, the traditional productionsmoothing/ buffer-stock model is not rejected by empirical evidence. Preliminary national accounts data of inventory...

Inventory fluctuations are an important phenomenon in business cycles. However, the preliminary data on inventory investment as published in the German national accounts are tremendously prone to revision and therefore ill-equipped to diagnose the current stance of the inventory cycle. The Ifo...

Papers estimating the reaction function of the Bundesbank generally find that its monetary policy from the 1970s to 1998 can well be captured by a standard Taylor rule according to which the central bank responds to the output gap and to deviations of inflation from target, but not to monetary...

The paper presents empirical work on short-run and long-run comovement between the German, French and Italian aggregates of private consumption, business investment, exports, imports, GDP, and changes in inventories. In country-specific data sets, cointegration analyses are carried out both to...

The paper derives the monetary policy reaction function implied by money growth targeting. It consists of an interest rate response to deviations of the inflation rate from target, to the change in the output gap, to money demand shocks and to the lagged interest rate. In the second part, it is...

Real residential investment in Germany is found to be cointegrated with population, real national income per capita and real house prices. This evidence is consistent with a model where the trend in housing demand is determined by demographic factors and economic well-being to which supply...