Works councils are the most important pillar of workplace industrial relations in Germany but little is known of their economic effects. The paper uses a modern, large-scale dataset to examine this issue. Consonant with recent applied theoretical conjectures, it is found that works councils are...

Common approaches to test for the economic value of directional forecasts are based on the classical Chi-square test for independence, Fisher’s exact test or the Pesaran and Timmerman (1992) test for market timing. These tests are asymptotically valid for serially independent observations....

This paper presents an approach to identify aggregate price reset hazards from the joint dynamic behavior of inflation and macroeconomic aggregates. The identification is possible due to the fact that inflation is composed of current and past reset prices and that the composition depends on the...

This paper uses the Bayesian approach to solve and estimate a New Keynesian model augmented by a generalized Phillips curve, in which the shape of the price reset hazards can be identi…ed using aggregate data. My empirical result shows that a constant hazard function is easily rejected by the...

Whelan (2007) found that the generalized Calvo-sticky-price model fails to replicate a typical feature of the empirical reduced-form Phillips curve - the positive dependence of inflation on its own lags. In this paper, I show hat it is the 4-period-Taylor-contract hazard function he chose that...

It is commonly accepted that information is helpful if it can be exploited to improve a decision making process. In economics, decisions are often based on forecasts of up- or downward movements of the variable of interest. We point out that directional forecasts can provide a useful framework...

A huge body of empirical and theoretical literature has emerged on the relationship between foreign exchange (FX) uncertainty and international trade. Empirical findings about the impact of FX uncertainty on trade figures are at best weak and often ambiguous with respect to its direction. Almost...