Standard measures of consumer price inflation are based on a bundle of representative goods. It is well known that this approach might overstate inflation for new products and products with fast increasing quality. For this reason, hedonic adjustment methods have been proposed and introduced in...

The macroeconomic development in West Germany in the aftermath of unification was characterized by a boom period in 1990/1991, a deep recession in 1992/1993 and a slow recovery since then. In East Germany, in contrast, unification induced a breakdown of production and employment followed by a...

Unification fundamentally changed the terms of quantitative macroeconomic analysis for Germany. Two main areas concerned are data availability for the eastern part of Germany and structural changes within the behavioural equations after unification. Our paper presents results from the estimation...

German unifikation hit the West German economy in a prosperous and appeared as a huge demand shock at least for the first few quarters. This combination resulted in a major increase of imports from the main trading partners of West Germany, which may have helped to cushion recessionary trends...

The rising trends both in drug addiction and crime rates are of major public concern in Germany. Surprisingly, the economic theory of crime seems to ignore the drugs-crime nexus, whereas the criminological literature considers illicit drug use a main reason of criminal activities. This paper...

A widely used method in the analysis of complex econometric models is to replace the "true model" by an aggregative one in which the variables are grouped and replaced by sums or weighted averages of the variables in each group. The analysis of the problem of choosing an aggregative model...

Standard measures of consumer price inflation are based on a bundle of representative goods. It is well known that this approach might overstate inflation for new products and products with fast increasing quality. For this reason, hedonic adjustment methods have been proposed and introduced in...