German unifikation hit the West German economy in a prosperous and appeared as a huge demand shock at least for the first few quarters. This combination resulted in a major increase of imports from the main trading partners of West Germany, which may have helped to cushion recessionary trends...

Usually, offcial and survey-based statistics guide policy makers in their choice of response instruments to economic crises. However, in an early phase, after a sudden and unforeseen shock has caused incalculable and fast-changing dynamics, data from traditional statistics are only available...

The macroeconomic development in West Germany in the aftermath of unification was characterized by a boom period in 1990/1991, a deep recession in 1992/1993 and a slow recovery since then. In East Germany, in contrast, unification induced a breakdown of production and employment followed by a...

Unification fundamentally changed the terms of quantitative macroeconomic analysis for Germany. Two main areas concerned are data availability for the eastern part of Germany and structural changes within the behavioural equations after unification. Our paper presents results from the estimation...

The rising trends both in drug addiction and crime rates are of major public concern in Germany. Surprisingly, the economic theory of crime seems to ignore the drugs-crime nexus, whereas the criminological literature considers illicit drug use a main reason of criminal activities. This paper...

At the turn of the millennium three frequently cited potential causes of new challenges for wage policy in Germany are revisited in this study: skilled-biased technological progress, the increasing international integration of labor and product markets, and the monetary integration of the EMU....

This paper is devoted to a new estimation of the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU) for the West German Economy 1980 to 1998. The novelty of the paper is the estimation of a time-varying NAIRU for West Germany employing the Kalman method together with confidence intervals...

Different stochastic simulation methods are used in order to check the robustness of the outcome of policy simulations with a macroeconometric model. A macroeconometric disequilibriummodel of the West German economy is used to analyze a reform proposal for the tax system. The model was estimated...