Data revisions to national accounts pose a serious challenge to policy decision making. Well-behaved revisions should be unbiased, small and unpredictable. This paper shows that revisions to German national accounts are biased, large and predictable. Moreover, using filtering techniques designed...

The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the need for timely and granular information to assess the state of the economy in real time. Weekly and daily indices have been constructed using higher frequency data to address this need. Yet the seasonal and calendar adjustment of the underlying time...

This paper focuses on the determination of inflation expectations. The following two questions are examined: How much do inflation expectations reflect different economic and institutional regime shifts and in which way do inflation expectations adjust to past inflation? The basic idea in the...

We construct a simple exchange economy overlapping generations model in which there are along with a public social security various private insurance schemes to explore fertility and the effects of various variables on it. In the private system parents can invest in children and benefit from...

Recent research provides controversial evidence on the stability of yield-curve based binary probit models for forecasting U.S. recessions. This paper reviews so far applied specifications and presents new procedures for examining the stability of selected probit models. It finds that a...

Various papers indicate that the yield-curve has superior predictive power for U.S. recessions. However, there is controversial evidence on the stability of the predictive relationship and it has remained unclear how the persistence of the underlying binary recession indicator should be taken...

In this paper, I examine the international welfare effects of monetary policy. I develop a New Keynesian two-country model, where central banks in both countries follow the Taylor rule. I show that a decrease in the domestic interest rate, under producer currency pricing, is a beggar-thyself...

Using an estimated large-scale New-Keynesian model, we assess welfare and business cycle consequences of a fiscal union within EMU. We differentiate between three different scenarios: public revenue equalisation, tax harmonisation and a centralised fiscal authority. Relative to the status quo,...

Between 1999 and the onset of the economic crisis in 2008 real exchange rates in Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain appreciated relative to the rest of the euro area. This divergence in competitiveness was reflected in the emergence of current account imbalances. Given that exchange rate...

We build a two-country version of the model in Gali & Monacelli (2005), which extends for a small open economy the new Keynesain DSGE model used as tool for monetary policy analysis in closed economies. A distinctive feature of the model is that the terms of trade enters directly into the new...