Eastern enlargement of the EU promises gains, but also imposes fiscal costs on incumbent countries. A sensitive issue concerns immigration, jobs and wages. We address these issues in a general equilibrium framework, both analytically and through numerical simulations. Analytical results identify...

This paper evaluates complementarities of labor market institutions and the business cycle in the context of a stochastic dynamic general equilibrium model economy. Matching between workers and vacancies with endogenous time spent in search, Nash-bargained wages, payroll taxation, and...

This paper presents an estimated DSGE model for the European Monetary Union. Our approach, contrary to the previous studies, accounts for heterogeneity within the euro area. We advance the empirical literature by estimating an open-economy model with unfiltered data, which is a much more...

We focus on a quantitative assessment of rigid labor markets in an environment of stable monetary policy. We ask how wages and labor market shocks feed into the inflation process and derive monetary policy implications. Towards that aim, we structurally model matching frictions and rigid wages...

The present paper compares the distributional and risk-sharing consequences of two pension reform proposals in Germany which both aim to improve the sustainability of the current system by introducing demographic variables to the benefit calculation. While the first reform proposes a so-called...

All countries in the European Union stand at the fore of a phenomenal demographic transition. Especially Germany will realize an enormous aging of its population. The reasons for this development are twofold: On the one hand, the number of elderly will more than double over the coming decades....

The German Income Tax Reform 2000, which announced a reduction in income tax rates to be implemented in a series of three stages, was welcomed by the public as a step towards unleashing lurking growth potentials. Nonetheless, in the course of the year 2001 a dispute arose, centering around the...

Mircrosimulation models (MSM) and Computable General Equilibrium models (CGE) have both been widely used in policy analysis. The combination of these two model types allows the utilisation of the advantages of both types. The aim of this paper is to describe the state-of-the-art in simulation...

This paper analyses the effects of a social assistance reform in Germany. In contrast to studies which are based on microsimulation methods we use a computable general equilibrium model which incorporates a discrete choice model of labour supply to simulate a variety of reform scenarios. The...

We present a model that integrates the discrete working time choice of heterogenous households into a general equilibrium setting where wages are determined by sectoral bargaining between firms and trade unions. The model is calibrated to German micro and macro data. We then use it to analyse...