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...

The removal of the lower bound on the EUR/CHF exchange rate in January 2015 provides a unique setting to study the implications of a large and sudden appreciation in an otherwise stable macroeconomic environment. Using transaction-level data on non-durable goods purchases by Swiss consumers, we...

The removal of the lower bound on the EUR/CHF exchange rate in January 2015 provides a unique setting to study the implications of a large and sudden appreciation in an otherwise stable macroeconomic environment. Using transaction-level data on non-durable goods purchases by Swiss consumers, we...

Focusing on the compression of wage cuts, many empirical studies find a high degree of downward nominal wage rigidity (DNWR). However, the resulting macroeconomic effects seem to be surprisingly weak. This contradiction can be explained within an intertemporal framework in which DNWR not only...

Viele empirische Studien, die die Komprimierung von Lohnkürzungen betrachteten, finden einen hohen Grad an Abwärtsnominallohnstarrheit (ANLS). Die resultierenden makroökonomischen Effekte scheinen jedoch überraschend gering zu sein. Dieser Widerspruch kann in einem intertemporalen Rahmen...

Dieser Beitrag analysiert die Existenz, das Ausmaß sowie die realwirtschaftlichen Implikationen nach unten starrer Nominallöhne in Deutschland. Unter Verwendung von drei alternativen Modellvarianten für die proportionale Abwärtsnominallohnstarrheit wird auf Grundlage der...

Using administrative data from Germany, this paper analyzes the relation between wages and past and current labor market conditions. Specifically, it explores whether the data is more consistent with implicit contract models (Beaudry/DiNardo, 1991) or a matching model with on-the-job search and...

Rising wage inequality in the U.S. and Britain (especially in the 1980s) and rising continental European unemployment (with rather stable wage inequality) have led to a popular view in the economics profession that these two phenomena are related to negative relative demand shocks against the...

This paper investigates wage setting in (west) Germany using the German Socioeconomic Panel dataset on individuals and compares the findings with those available for the United Kingdom and the United States. The fraction of job stayers in (west) Germany who suffer unchanged wages or wage cuts...

Germany is the laggard of Europe, yet the country is world champion in merchandise exports. The paper tries to solve this theoretical and empirical puzzle by diagnosing a "pathological export boom" and a "bazaar effect". Excessively high wages defended by unions and the welfare state against the...