At the turn of the millennium three frequently cited potential causes of new challenges for wage policy in Germany are revisited in this study: skilled- biased technological progress, the increasing international integration of labor and product markets, and the monetary integration of the EMU....

In an a priori view, it is usually assumed that the business cycle of manufacturing industries leads the business cycle of the service sector. This seems to be even more plausible for the relationship between business-related services, whose high growth rates in recent years were largely due to...

Rising wage inequality in the U.S. and Britain (especially in the 1980s) and rising continental European unemployment (with rather stable wage inequality) have led to a popular view in the economics profession that these two phenomena are related to negative relative demand shocks against the...

Using linked employer–employee panel data for Germany, this paper investigates whether firms implement real wage reductions in a selective manner. In line with insider–outsider and several strands of efficiency wage theory, we find strong evidence for selective wage cuts with...

The study analyses the business cycles of the G7 countries in a structural vector autoregression(SVAR) framework comprising output, nominal interest rate and inflation. Common and country-specific supply, demand and nominal shocks of each G7 country are identified, and the corresponding shock...

Business cycles reflect changes over time in the amount of trade between individuals. In this paper we show that incorporating explicitly intra-temporal gains from trade between individuals into a macroeconomic model can provide new insight into the potential mechanisms driving economic...

In an influential recent paper, Beaudry and Portier (2006) propose a sequential approach for identifying technological news shocks. Thereby, the correlation coefficient between news shocks of a short-run identification scheme and technology shocks of a long-run identification scheme in the VAR...

Recent empirical literature delivered, based on different structural VAR approaches, controversial results concerning the role of anticipated technology-news-shocks in business cycle fluctuations. We deal with this controversy and investigate (i) the extent to thich two prominent structural VAR...

Recent research suggests that employment in young firms is more negatively impacted during economic downturns than employment in incumbent firms. This questions the effectiveness of policies that promote entrepreneurship to fight crises. We complement prior research that is mostly based on...