This paper studies Ramsey-optimal monetary and fiscal policy in a New Keynesian 2-country open economy framework, which is used to assess how far fiscal policy can substitute for the role of nominal exchange rates within a monetary union. Giving up exchange rate flexibility leads to welfare...

This paper proposes a new perspective on international capital flows and countries' long-run external asset position. Cross-sectional evidence for 84 developing countries shows that over the last three decades countries that have had on average higher volatility of output growth (1) accumulated...

This paper studies the mechanisms driving the persistently high unemployment rate during the last recession and mild recovery. Previous studies have examined the demographic aspect of the recession. We focus on specific industries. Consequently, we propose a methodology to decompose changes in...

This paper investigates to what extent the tax and transfer systems in Europe protect households at different income levels against losses in current income caused by economic downturns like the present financial crisis. We use a multi country micro simulation model to analyse how shocks on...

This paper analyzes Germany's unusual labor market experience during the Great Recession. We estimate a general equilibrium model with a detailed labor market block for post-unification Germany. This allows us to disentangle the role of institutions (short-time work, government spending rules)...

The paper takes a comparative perspective on the labour market impact on G20 and EU countries of the financial and economic crisis that began in 2008. It starts from the observation that the decline in employment and rise in unemployment in relation to output or GDP reductions varies...

We assess the effects of financial shocks on inflation, and to what extent financial shocks can account for the "missing disinflation" during the Great Recession. We apply a vector autoregressive model to US data and identify financial shocks through sign restrictions. Our main finding is that...

The role of bank capital as a propagation channel of shocks is strongly pronounced in recent macroeconomic models. In this paper, we show how the evolution of bank capital depends on the share of non-state-contingent assets in banks’ balance sheets and present the consequences for...

We study whether a central bank should deviate from its objective of price stability to promote financial stability. We tackle this question within a textbook New Keynesian model augmented with capital accumulation and microfounded endogenous financial crises. We compare several interest rate...