The main characteristic of the implementation of the European Monetary Union (EMU) is the transition from various national currencies to the Euro, the common European currency. A final fixing of the individual bilateral exchange rates of all European countries involved in the Monetary Union...

We develop a novel empirical approach to identify the effectiveness of policies against a pandemic. The essence of our approach is the insight that epidemic dynamics are best tracked over stages, rather than over time. We use a normalization procedure that makes the pre-policy paths of the...

We simulate the fiscal stimulus packages set up by the German government to allevi-ate the costs of the COVID-19 pandemic in a dynamic New Keynesian multi-sectorgeneral equilibrium model. We find that, cumulated over 2020-2022, output lossesrelative to steady state can be reduced by more than 4...

The legal regulations require the minimum wage in Germany to be adjusted biennially which gives rise to a policy discontinuity. From the perspective of rational expectations models, such policy features render standard local approximation techniques infeasible. The paper presents a stylised...

Using micro price data underlying the Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices in France, Germany and Italy, we estimate relative price trends over the product life cycle and show that minimizing price and mark-up distortions in the presence of these trends requires targeting a significantly positive...

This paper investigates the scarcity effects of quantitative easing (QE) policies, drawing on intra-day transaction-level data for German government bonds, purchased under the Public Sector Purchase Program (PSPP) of the ECB/Eurosystem. This paper is the first to match high-frequency QE purchase...

From 2014 until present, housing prices in Germany have been rising faster than consumer prices in all quarters except one, raising concerns about an excessive over-heating of the housing market. To assess the vulnerability of the German housing market to a future realignment of prices or even a...

This paper sheds light on the effect of quantitative easing (QE) on bank lending. Using data on German banks for 2014-2016, I show that QE encourages banks to rebalance from securities to loans. For identification, I use bond redemptions as exogenous variation in banks' need to rebalance their...