The paper investigates the predictive power of a new survey implemented by the Federal Employment Agency (FEA) for forecasting German unemployment in the short run. Every month, the CEOs of the FEA's regional agencies are asked about their expectations of future labor market developments. We...

This paper investigates the role of structural imbalance between job seekers and job openings for the forecasting performance of a labour market matching function. Starting from a Cobb-Douglas matching function with constant returns to scale (CRS) in each frictional micro market shows that on...

This paper investigates the role of mismatch between job seekers and job openings for the forecasting performance of a labor market matching function. In theory, higher mismatch lowers matching efficiency which increases the risk that the vacancies cannot be filled within the usual period of...

The paper investigates the predictive power of a new survey implemented by the Federal Employment Agency (FEA) for forecasting German unemployment in the short run. Every month, the CEOs of the FEA's regional agencies are asked about their expectations of future labor market developments. We...

This paper explores the effects of non-standard monetary policies on international yield relationships. Based on a descriptive analysis of international long-term yields, we find evidence that long-term rates have followed a global downward trend prior to as well as during the financial crisis....

We construct a new Markov-switching unobserved components framework for the analysis of hysteresis effects. Our model unifies the ingredients of trend-cycle decomposition, identification of spillovers between the components and asymmetry over the business cycle. Employing the model for Germany...

We sharpen tests for "discouragement" and "added worker" effects by splitting the explanatory variable - the unemployment rate - into a short-term and a long-term component. While short-term unemployment might not result in additional workers on a large scale, long-term unemployment reduces...

Using German data this study applies an unobserved-components approach to disentangle the unemployment rate into a (stochastic) trend and a cyclical part and to estimate the influence of these components on labor participation. The persistent trend component of unemployment, which triggers...

Between 1979 and 2009, the German labour market moved along a Beveridge curve with changing slope that usually shifted outwards but once inwards. We employ an unobserved components model to simultaneously disentangle permanent and transitory components of matching efficiency and separation rate...

This paper tackles the issue of cross-section dependence for the monetary exchange rate model in the presence of unobserved common factors using panel data from 1973 until 2007 for 19 OECD countries. Applying a principal component analysis we distinguish between common factors and idiosyncratic...