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...

We analyze the contribution of credit spread, house and stock price shocks to GDP growth in the US based on a Bayesian VAR with time-varying parameters estimated over 1958-2012. Our main findings are: (i) The contribution of financial shocks to GDP growth fluctuates from about 20 percent in...

Bank capital regulations are intended to enhance financial stability in the long run, but may, in the meanwhile, involve costs for the real economy. To examine these costs we propose a narrative index of aggregate tightenings in regulatory US bank capital requirements from 1979 to 2008....

Retraining the labor force to match the demands of a modern economy is an important task during the transition process from a centrally planned to a market economy. This need is particular pressing in East Germany, because the transition process is much faster there than in the rest of Eastern...

This paper explores the potential of an approach suggested by Manski of obtaining nonparametric bounds for treatment effects in evaluation studies without knowledge of the participation process. The practical concern is the effects of continuous vocational training in East Germany. The empirical...

In the second part of the 1990's Switzerland conducted an ambitious active labour market policy (ALMP) encompassing a wide variety of programmes. We evaluate the effects of these programmes on the individual employment probability of potential participants. Our econometric analysis uses...

We study the link between the global financial cycle and macroeconomic tail risks using quantile vector autoregressions. Contractionary shocks to financial conditions and monetary policy in the United States cause elevated downside risks to growth around the world. By tightening financial...