This paper examines the role of currency and banking in the German financial crisis of 1931 for both Germany and the U.S. We specify a structural dynamic factor model to identify financial and monetary factors separately for each of the two economies. We find that monetary transmission through...

In this paper, we provide a comprehensive overview of labour market dynamics in Western Ger- many by looking at gross worker flows. To do so, we use a subsample of the registry data collected by the German social security system, the IAB employment sample, for the time period 1975-2001. The...

This paper reviews the dramatic and widely noted developments in the German labor market in the past decade and surveys the most plausible reasons for these changes. Alternative hypotheses are compared and contrasted. I argue that the labor market reforms associated with the Agenda 2010 – the...

The supply and demand framework of Katz and Murphy (1992) provides new evidence on the source of changes in socially insured full-time and part-time employment in years preceding and following the implementation of the landmark Hartz reforms in Germany. Our findings are consistent with a stable...

Using two data sets derived from German administrative data, including a linked employer-employee data set, we investigate the cyclicality of worker and job flows. The analysis stresses the importance of two-sided labour market heterogeneity in this context, taking into account both observed and...

Germany experienced an even deeper fall in GDP in the Great Recession than the United States with little employment loss. Employers' reticence to hire in the preceding expansion - associated in part with a lack of confidence it would last - contributed to an employment shortfall equivalent to 40...

In this paper, we review the most common specifications of discrete-time stochastic volatility (SV) models and illustrate the major principles of corresponding Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) based statistical inference. We provide a hands-on ap proach which is easily implemented in empirical...

Risk management and the thorough understanding of the relations between financial markets and the standard theory of macroeconomics have always been among the topics most addressed by researchers, both financial mathematicians and economists. This work aims at explaining investors' behavior from...

It is investigated whether Euro-area variables can be forecast better based on synthetic time series for the pre-Euro period or by using just data from Germany for the pre-Euro period. Our forecast comparison is based on quarterly data for the period 1970Q1 - 2003Q4 for ten macroeconomic...

The analysis of return series from financial markets is often based on the Peaks-over-threshold (POT) model. This model assumes independent and identically distributed observations and therefore a Poisson process is used to characterize the occurrence of extreme events. However, stylized facts...