We provide new estimates on worker flow rates in and out of unemployment for Germany covering the last six decades. In the 1980s, Germany emerged as the sick man of Europe with a labor market characterized by persistently high unemployment rates. We attribute a substantial fraction of the rise...

COVID-19 is spreading and has reached the state of a worldwide pandemic and health systems are or will be tested in how they can deal with it. So far, during this early phase of the pandemic, outcomes in terms of case-fatality rates (CFR) differ widely across countries. We explore how...

Policies to support the transition to a carbon-neutral economy are high on the policy agenda. Their effectiveness in reducing carbon emissions and their distributional consequences are actively debated. One key reason for the ongoing debate is that quantitative answers regarding the...

In this paper we analyze European business cycles before and under EMU. Across the two periods we find 1) a significant decline in real exchange rate volatility, 2) significant changes in cross-country correlations, and 3) the volatility of macroeconomic fundamentals largely unchanged. We...

In contrast to the notion that the exchange-rate regime is non-neutral, there is little evidence that EMU has changed the European business cycle. In fact, we find the volatility of macroeconomic fundamentals largely unchanged before and after the introduction of the euro. Exceptions are a...