SMEs play a crucial role for European economies. The numbers show the high importance of SMEs for national economies. Accordingly, it is no surprise that the regulatory framework SMEs are imbedded in is the subject of an important political discussion. In the discussion it is frequently...

We analyse the impact of both the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 and the European sovereign and banking crisis of 2011-13 on firm-level productivity in France, Italy and Spain. We show that relying on a single break date in 2008 misses both the Eurozone crisis and countries' institutional...

Aim: The paper measures the impact of negative interest rates on listed firms in the original euro zone countries. It also measures the impact of the first COVID-19 year. Design / research methods: The paper uses panel data to measure the influence of the short-term ECB deposit rate and the...

In a New Keynesian DSGE model with non-Ricardian consumers, we show that automatic stabilization according to a countercyclical spending rule following the idea of the debt brake is well suited both to steer the economy and in terms of welfare. In particular, the adjustment account set up to...

This paper investigates the effects of government spending on key macroeconomic variables in Germany. It contributes to the ongoing debate on how to properly identify exogenous fiscal shocks in the data and on whether or not the government should intervene in the business cycle. Following Ramey...

In this paper, we use the estimated three-region DSGE model GEAR, which pictures Germany, the Euro Area and the Rest of the world and which is used by the Deutsche Bundesbank for policy analysis, to analyze how discretionary fiscal policy in Germany and the rest of EMU affected GDP growth and...

In a New Keynesian DSGE model with non-Ricardian consumers, we show that automatic stabilization according to a countercyclical spending rule following the idea of the debt brake is well suited both to steer the economy and in terms of welfare. In particular, the adjustment account set up to...

Does the state of the business cycle matter for the effects of fiscal policy shocks on GDP? This study analyses quarterly German data from 1976 to 2009 in a threshold SVAR, expanding the SVAR approach by Blanchard and Perotti (2002). In a linear benchmark SVAR, the analysis finds that hiking...

Short-time work is a labor market policy that subsidizes working time reductions among firms in financial difficulty in order to prevent layoffs and stabilize employment. Many OECD countries have used this policy in the Great Recession, for example. This paper shows that the effects of...

Short-time work is a labor market policy that subsidizes working time reductions among firms in financial difficulty to prevent layoffs. Many OECD countries have used this policy in the Great Recession. This paper shows that the effects of short-time work are strongly time dependent and...