Die 1990 eingeführte Wirtschafts- und Währungsunion der BRD mit der DDR und schließlich die deutsche Wiedervereinigung war und ist für jede Statistik, die versucht die Lebensverhältnisse in Ost und West zu vergleichen, eine große Herausforderung. In seinem einleitenden Teil dokumentiert...

Real exchange rates are quite persistent. Standard unit root tests are not very powerful in drawing a conclusion regarding the validity of purchasing power parity [PPP]. Rather than asking if PPP holds throughout the whole sample period, we examine if PPP holds sometimes by employing...

This paper provides an empirical investigation of the wage, price and unemployment dynamics that have taken place in Spain during the last two decades. The aim of this paper is to shed light on the impact of the European economic integration process on Spanish labour market and the convergence...

By disaggregating price indices, it becomes apparent that the real exchange rate consists of the real exchange rate for a single good and a weighted sum of relative prices between goods. When applying a battery of panel unit root tests to this sum and its components, it is found that both the...

In this paper we present a critical overview of differnt methods of constructing an equilibrium exchange rate. The recent literature on purchasing power parity (PPP) indicates that on its own PPP is not a good vehicle for defining an equilibrium exchange rate. Rather, we argue that the latter...

Panel unit root tests of real exchange rates - as opposed to univariate tests - usually reject non-stationarity. These tests, however, could be biased if the real exchange rate contained MA roots. Indeed, two independent arguments claim that the real exchange rate, being a sum of a stationary...