Official (government-to-government) lending is much larger than commonly known, often surpassing total private cross-border capital flows, especially during disasters such as wars, financial crises and natural catastrophes. We assemble the first comprehensive long-run dataset of official...

This paper contributes to Hübler (2008) who analyses a partial equilibrium model of outsourcing with Cournot competition in intermediate good production. Final production is located in Western Europe, whereas the intermediate good can be manufactured by a Western (outsourcing) or Eastern...

The economic effects of offshoring have been subject to extensive empirical analysis in the past, but many studies have not accurately distinguished between offshoring, domestic outsourcing, and the substitution of domestic by foreign suppliers. In this study I provide stylized facts on...

Based on a novel dataset, the "German Management and Organizational Practices" (GMOP) Survey, we calculate establishment specific management scores following Bloom and van Reenen as indicators of management quality. We find substantial heterogeneity in management practices across establishments...

We use a unique cross-section survey of manufacturing firms from four European countries (France, Germany, Italy, Spain) linked with balance sheet data to study the relationship between key aspects of globalization and firm-level markups. The main results are: (i) Exporting is positively...

In this paper, we use survey data to analyze the rationality of professional macroeconomic forecasts. We analyze both individual forecasts and average forecasts. We provide evidence on the properties of forecasts for all the G7-counties and four different macroeconomic variables. Furthermore, we...

We build quadratic labor adjustment costs into an otherwise standard New-Keynesian model of the business cycle and show that this is sufficient to increase both, output and inflation persistence. -- Monetary persistence ; labor adjustment costs

During the ongoing financial crisis the analysis of similar historical crises has gained more and more attention among economic researchers and forecasters. Existing studies, however, do not tackle the immense heterogeneity that is present in cross-country samples in a formal and consistent way....

This paper estimates a simple univariate model of expectation or opinion formation in continuous time adapting a 'canonical' stochastic model of collective opinion dynamics (Weidlich and Haag, 1983; Lux, 1995, 2007). This framework is applied to a selected data set on survey-based expectations from...

A recent literature has pointed at potential negative effects of exchange rate volatility on innovation. In this paper, we propose that there may be a direct effect as well as an indirect effect via export activity. We test these hypotheses for sectoral R&D intensities using OECD panel data for...