Mit den fortgesetzten Streiks bei der Deutschen Bahn und der Lufthansa wächst der Unmut über die Spartengewerkschaften. Sollte der Gesetzgeber die Tarifpluralität und das Handeln kleiner Gewerkschaften beschneiden? Norbert Berthold, Universität Würzburg, plädiert für Tarifpluralität...

Gefährdet die Gründung von Spartengewerkschaften und das Nebeneinander von mehreren Tarifverträgen in einem Unternehmen die Stabilität der Arbeitsbeziehungen in Deutschland? Dieter Hundt, Präsident der Bundesvereinigung der Deutschen Arbeitgeberverbände, ist davon überzeugt, dass die...

Gefährden die Gründung von Spartengewerkschaften und das Nebeneinander von mehreren Tarifverträgen in einem Unternehmen die Stabilität der Arbeitsbeziehungen in Deutschland? Zur Ergänzung der Beiträge in ifo Schnelldienst 9/2012 und 10/2012 stellt, IG BAU, das Prinzip der Tarifeinheit aus...

Government bond spreads increased rapidly during the financial turmoil in the euro area. In general, government bond spreads in the euro area are attributed to solvency and liquidity risks and determinants thereof. This paper proposes the use of latent processes to model the time variation...

The euro crisis was typically presented as excessive fiscal deficits leading to the accumulation of unsustainable public debts. This diagnosis applied most notably in Greece and Italy, but also Portugal and Spain. Implicit in much of the analysis, and occasionally explicit, was the suggestion...

This study examines the key drivers of sovereign default risk in five euro area periphery countries and three euro-candidates that are currently pursuing independent monetary policies. We argue that the recent proliferation of sovereign risk premiums stems from both domestic and international...

This study examines the return (price) and volatility spillovers among the money, stock, foreign exchange and bond markets of the euro area, utilizing the forecast-error variance decomposition framework of a generalized VAR model proposed by Diebold and Yilmaz (2012) [Better to give than to...

This paper measures the pass-through of exchange rate changes into domestic inflation within a cointegrated VAR (CVAR) framework. This issue is of particular interest for the euro area (EA) as Member Sates cede their national currencies and no longer have options of using monetary policy to...

In a standard linear structural VAR framework we analyse the size and sign of fiscal multipliers in the euro area, using a newly available quarterly dataset of fiscal variables for the period 1981-2007. From a policy perspective, the analysis of fiscal multipliers in "average times" provides...

The synchronization of business cycles represents one of the conditions that countries have to fulfil to become part of an optimum currency area, as well as a condition for the efficient implementation of a common economicpolicy in these countries. This paper examines the extent to which Serbia...