In der vorliegenden Arbeit untersuchen wir die Eignung der ifo-Geschäftserwartungen und der ZEW-Konjunkturerwartungen als Frühindikatoren für die deutsche Industrieproduktion. Anhand von Granger-Kausalitätstests wird gezeigt, dass die auf Umfragen unter Finanzanalysten basierenden...

We analyze four economic sentiment indicators for the German economy regarding their ability to forecast economic activity. Using cross correlations and Granger causality tests we find that the ifo business expectations (ifo), the Purchasing Managers Index (PMI) and the ZEW Indicator of Economic...

Based on a structural model of fertility and female labour force supply with unobserved heterogeneity and state dependence, we evaluate the 2007 reform of parental leave benefits in Germany, which replaced a flat, means-tested benefit by a generous earnings-related transfer. The model predicts a...

We estimate a structural life-cycle model of fertility and female labour supply and use it to evaluate the effects of a number of key family policy measures based on data for Germany. Parental leave benefits, child benefits and subsidized childcare are found to have substantial fertility...

In this paper we analyse the relationship between export and innovation activities of German service sector companies using data from the 1997 wave of the Mannheim Innovation Panel in the Service Sector. There is a lot of support for the Schumpeterian hypothesis of export activities being mainly...

This paper examines return predictability when the investor is uncertain about the right state variables. A novel feature of the model averaging approach used in this paper is to account for finite-sample bias of the coefficients in the predictive regressions. Drawing on an extensive...

This paper quantifies the life-cycle incidence of key family policy measures in Germany. The analysis is based on a novel dynamic microsimulation model that combines simulated family life-cycles for a base population from the 2009 wave of the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) with a...

In the paper we simulate a revenue-neutral cut in the social security contribution rate using five different types of macro- / microeconomic models, namely two models based on time-series data where the labour market is modelled basically demand oriented, two models of the class of computable...