There is a broad consensus among economists that, in the long run, inflation is a monetary phenomenon. However, monetary policy is often analysed using models that have no causal role for monetary aggregates in the propagation of inflationary processes. Moreover, impulses from monetary policy...

This paper reviews theory and evidence of the welfare effects of inflation from a costbenefit perspective. Basic models and selected empirical results are discussed. Historically, in assessing the welfare effects of inflation, the distortion of money demand played a prominent role. More...

This paper discusses methods to quantify risk and uncertainty in macroeconomic forecasts. Both, parametric and non-parametric procedures are developed. The former are based on a class of asymmetrically weighted normal distributions whereas the latter employ asymmetric bootstrap simulations. Both...

Das System der Volkswirtschaftlichen Gesamtrechnungen (VGR) in Deutschland wurde im Frühjahr 2005 von der Festpreisbasis auf das Vorjahrespreiskonzept (Kettenindexkonzept) umgestellt. Dadurch werden Substitutionseffekte besser berücksichtigt und die periodische Umbasierung der Zeitreihen...

Cyclically induced changes in taxes and government expenditures which tend to stabilise aggregate output are called automatic stabilisers. Using a small macro model, this paper reviews alternative methods of measuring the smoothing power of automatic stabilisers and discusses their relationship...

The carry-over effect is the advance contribution of the old year to growth in the new year. Among practitioners the informative content of the carry-over effect for short-term forecasting is undisputed and is used routinely in economic forecasting. In this paper, the carry-over effect is...

First and higher order digits in data sets of natural and socio-economic processes often follow a distribution called Benford's law. This phenomenon has been used in many business and scientific applications, especially in fraud detection for financial data. In this paper, we analyse whether...

This paper analyses how many euro coins outflow from Germany and which composition of coins is to be expected in the long run. To this end, a simple mathematical model is formulated and calibrated for €1 coins. The introduction of the euro coins in 2002 presented a unique opportunity to...

In dieser Studie wird die kürzlich von Feldstein (1996) aufgeworfene Frage für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland empirisch untersucht: "If the true and fully anticipated rate of inflation has stabilized at a low level, i.e. two per cent, is the gain from reducing inflation to zero worth the...

This study empirically investigates for the case of Germany the following question, recently posed by Feldstein (1996): "lf the true and fully anticipated rate of inflation has stabilized at a low level, i.e. two per cent, is the gain from reducing inflation to zero worth the sacrifice in output...