This paper sets out to explore the black box of recent employment dynamics in Germany and thus to identify positive and negative implications that might be of interest for future policymaking. The starting point of our analysis is the question as to whether recent employment growth in Germany is...

This paper surveys the link between imperfect competition and the effects of fiscal policy on output, employment and welfare. We examine static and dynamic models, with and without entry under a variety of assumptions using a common analytical framework. We find that in general there is a robust...

This paper develops a 9-dimensional SVAR to investigate the sources of the U.S. business cycle. We extend the standard set of identified shocks to include unexpected changes in commodity prices. Our main result is that commodity price shocks are a very important driving force of macroeconomic...

We develop a generalised impulse response function (GIRF) approach to explore the different impacts of aggregate and sectoral shocks within a VAR-GARCH-M model. Using the output of our GIRF analysis, we explore the behaviour of three European countries (Germany, Spain and the UK). We analyse the...

What happens if the government's willingness to stabilize a large stock of debt is waning, while the central bank is adamant about preventing a rise in inflation? The large fiscal imbalance brings about inflationary pressures, triggering a monetary tightening, further debt accumulation, and...

According to the French law, the short-time compensation (STC) program aims at avoiding redundancies during short-term downturns. Even if it does not shield establishments from redundancies (Calavrezo, Duhautois and Walkowiak, 2009a), STC can preserve an establishment's survival. This paper...

Using post-1995 Japanese data we propose a theory-based sign-restriction SVAR approach to identify monetary policy shocks when the economy is at the zero-lower bound. The identifying restrictions accord with predictions of corresponding DSGE models. Our results show that while a quantitative...

The Great Recession triggered a resurgence of short-time work (STW) throughout the OECD. Several countries introduced from scratch STW or significantly expanded the scope of the programmes already in place. In some countries like Italy, Japan and Germany between 2.5 and 5 per cent of the...