This dissertation was written by Johannes Pfeiffer while he was working with the ifo Institute for Economic Research. It was completed in November 2016 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the department of economics of the University Regensburg in December 2016. The thesis studies unintended...

How does an artist's death impact on the price of his or her works of art? We investigate this question in an infinite-horizon dynamic general equilibrium setting. Employing the open-loop Stackelberg equilibrium concept to describe the interactive behaviour of collectors and artists, we find...

Using a unique German firm-level data set, this paper is the first to jointly study the cyclical properties of the cross-sections of firm-level real value added and Solow residual innovations, as well as capital and employment adjustment. We find two new business cycle facts: 1) The...

This paper explores different fiscal stimuli within a business cycle model with an endogenous number of firms. We demonstrate that a changing number of firms is a crucial dimension for evaluating fiscal policy since it accelerates the impacts of fiscal policy. In the presence of demand stimuli...

We analyze the dynamic effects of lumpy factor adjustments at the firm level onto the aggregate economy. We find that distinguishing between capital and labour as lumpy factors within the production function result in very dfferent dynamics for aggregate output, investment and labour in an...

I explore the implications of the lumpy labor adjustment as a propagation mechanism for aggregate dynamics. The model I use nests the basic RBC model with a staggered-job-turnover in the spirit of Taylor (1980) and Calvo (1983). It extends this approach by introducing a Weibull-distributed labor...

Using a German firm-level data set, this paper is the first to jointly study the cyclical properties of the cross-sections of firm-level real value added and Solow residual innovations, as well as capital and employment adjustment. We find two new business cycle facts: 1) The cross-sectional...

We build and estimate a two-sector (goods and services) dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with two types of inventories: materials (input) inventories facilitate the production of finished goods, while finished goods (output) inventories yield utility services. The model is estimated...

The appropriate way of quantifying how taxation of a firm's income and capital can distort its optimizing conditions is a recurring issue in the literature on optimal taxation. Exponential decay, although empirically contested, is almost ubiquitous. In the present paper a generalized framework...

In this note we compare the laissez-faire steady-state solution in the Howitt and Aghion (1998) model to the social optimum. The analysis offers several new insights in comparison to the welfare analysis in Aghion and Howitt (1992). We find various new distortions between private and optimal...