The catching up process in Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland is analyzed by investigating the integration properties of log-differences in per-capita GDP versus the EU15 and a Mediterranean country group. We account for structural changes by using unit root tests that allow for two endogenous...

This paper discusses the paper "The Source of Historical Economic Fluctuations: An Analysis using Long-Run Restrictions" by Neville Francis and Valerie A. Ramey. It argues that these authors have made great progress both in the precise measurement of labor input as well as determining the effect...

This paper aims to study the quantitative significance of lumpy labor adjustment as a propagation mechanism for business cycles. In the baseline model, I introduce lumpy job turnover in the spirit of Taylor (1980) and Calvo (1983) in a DSGE framework and find that it performs as same as the...

A large body of literature explains the inferior position of unskilled workers by imposing a structural shift in the labor force skill composition. This paper takes a different approach by emphasizing the connection between cyclical variations in skilled and unskilled labor markets. Using a...

I explore the aggregate effects of micro lumpy labor adjustment in a prototypical RBC model, which embeds a stochastic labor duration mechanism in the spirit of Calvo(1983), and it extends this approach by introducing a Weibull-distributed labor adjustment process to capture the increasing...

Fifteen years after German reunification, the facts about slow regional convergence have born out the prediction of Barro (1991), except that migration out of East Germany has not slowed down. I document that in particular the 18-29 year old are leaving East Germany, and that the emigration has...

In this paper, I investigate the scope of a model with exogenous habit formation - or `catching up with the Joneses`, see Abel (1990) - to generate the observed equity premium as well as other key macroeconomic facts. Along the way, I derive restrictions for four out of eight parameters for a...

Most treatments of the Great Depression have focused on its onset and its aftermath. In contrast, we take a unified view of the interwar period. We look at the slide into and the emergence from the 1920-21 recession and the roaring 1920s boom, as well as the slide into the Great Depression after...

Empirical observations show that education helps to protect against labor market risks. This is twofold: The higher educated face a higher expected wage income and a lower probability of being unemployed. Although this relationship has been analyzed in the literature broadly, several questions...

In this paper, I investigate the scope of a model with exogenous habit formation - or `catching up with the Joneses`, see Abel (1990) - to generate the observed equity premium as well as other key macroeconomic facts. Along the way, I derive restrictions for four out of eight parameters for a...