Was the collapse of world trade between 1928 and 1937 caused by higher transport costs, increased protectionism or the collapse of the gold standard? Using recent advances in the estimation of gravity equations, I examine the partial and general equilibrium effects of bilateral distance,...

This study provides evidence on how German multinational firms have restructured their service activities around the recent crisis. Making use of new micro-level data on service imports of German multinationals from 2002-2008, we assess the determinants of service offshoring along the extensive...

This study finds that equity returns in the banking sector in the wake of the Great Recession and the European sovereign debt crisis have been driven mainly by weak growth prospects and heightened sovereign risk and to a lesser extent, by deteriorating funding conditions and investor sentiment....

Based on the decline in real GDP growth, many economists now believe that the 'Great Recession', the output contraction the world experienced in 2008–09, is the deepest global economic contraction since the Great Depression. But as real-time real GDP data are typically revised, we investigate...

In this paper, we examine the macro-to-micro-transition of cluster externalities to firms and how it is affected by the macroeconomic instability caused by the recessionary shock of 2008/2009. Using data from 16,166 manufacturing and business services firms nested in 390 German regions, we...

The current paper broadens the understanding for the role of uncertainty in the context of a macroeconomic environment. It focuses on the implications of uncertainty shocks on indicators that tend to precede financial crises. In an empirical analysis we show for a set of four euro area countries...

Survey data on inflation expectations show that: (i) private sector forecasts and central bank forecasts are not fully aligned and (ii) private sector forecasters disagree about inflation expectations. To reconcile these two facts we introduce dispersed information in a New Keynesian model,...