This dissertation comprises three distinct economic stduies. The first deals with the origin of business cycle fluctuations and the other two with the measurement of financial constraints and the identification of the respective treatment effect.

In this paper, we examine the German business cycle (from 1955 to 1994) in order to identify univariate and multivariate outliers as well as influence points corresponding to Linear Discriminant Analysis. The locations of the corresponding observations are compared and economically interpreted.

This paper analyzes the career progression of skilled and unskilled workers, with a focus on how careers are affected by economic downturns and whether formal skills, acquired early on, can shield workers from the effect of recessions. Using detailed administrative data for Germany for numerous...

Im Rahmen der regelmäßigen Revisionen der Volkswirtschaftlichen Gesamtrechnungen (VGR) werden nicht nur die Daten am aktuellen Rand, sondern auch weit in die Vergangenheit zurückreichende Zeitreihen überarbeitet. Damit gehen regelmäßig Niveaueffekte, zum Beispiel ein höheres...

We use an estimated monetary business cycle model with search and matching frictions in the labor market and nominal price and wage rigidities to study four countries (the U.S., the U.K., Sweden, and Germany) during the financial crisis and the Great Recession. We estimate the model over the...

Globalization has affected business cycle developments in OECD countries and has increased activities of firms across national borders. This paper analyzes whether these two developments are linked. We use a new firm-level dataset on the foreign activities of German firms to test whether foreign...

The paper investigates the sources of macroeconomic forecast errors in Germany. The predictions of the so-called "six leading" research institutes are analyzed. The forecast errors are discussed within an aggregate demand/supply scheme. Structural Vector Autoregressive Models are estimated to...

This paper studies the long-run relationship between consumption, asset wealth and income in Germany, based on data from 1980 to 2003. While earlier studies – mostly for the Anglo- Saxon economies – have generally documented that departures of these three variables from their common trend...

The economic forecasts for Germany in the period 2001 to 2003 grossly missed reality. Forecasters estimated an average annual growth rate of 1.6 per cent, but real GDP actually grew by only 0.3 per cent per annum. In 2003 the real GDP in Germany even shrank by 0.1 per cent. Forecasters tend to...