Male life expectancy at birth fell by over six years in Russia between 1989 and 1994. Many other countries of the former Soviet Union saw similar declines, and female life expectancy fell as well. Using cross-country and Russian household survey data, we assess six possible explanations for this...

Over the past 15 years there has been remarkable progress in the specification and estimation of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models. Central banks in developed and emerging market economies have become increasingly interested in their usefulness for policy analysis and...

We propose a Nelson-Siegel type interest rate term structure model where the underlying yield factors follow autoregressive processes with stochastic volatility. The factor volatilities parsimoniously capture risk inherent to the term structure and are associated with the time-varying...

In this paper we develop a business cycle measure that can be shown to have excellent ex-ante forecasting properties for GDP growth. For identifying business cycle movements, we use a semantic approach. We infer nine different states of the economy directly from firms' responses in business...

Die vorliegende Arbeit untersucht, wie sich Angebots-, Nachfrage- und geldpolitische Schocks aus den Vereinigten Staaten auf Deutschland übertragen. Dabei wird ein so genanntes factor-augmented vector autoregressive model (FAVAR) auf einen neu zusammengestellten Datensatz mit mehr als 200...

The Central European countries became members of the European Union (EU) in May 2004. Has their accession into the EU also resulted in a stronger financial integration with the global economy in general and with the "old" EU countries in particular? Based on a cointegration analysis applied to...

In this paper, we develop and apply Bayesian inference for an extended Nelson-Siegel (1987) term structure model capturing interest rate risk. The so-called Stochastic Volatility Nelson-Siegel (SVNS) model allows for stochastic volatility in the underlying yield factors. We propose a Markov...

A basic assumption of the gravity equation of international trade is that increasing trade costs lower exports. Butintuition and theory imply that a high export volume lowers bilateral trade costs as well, because a fixed cost intensivetrade sector probably bears lower average costs with more...

This paper develops and estimates a search model of the labor market where jobs are characterized by wages and work-hours flexibility. Flexibility is valued by workers, and is costly to provide for employers. The model generates observed wage distributions directly related to the preference for...

Using a Dynamic Semiparametric Factor Model (DSFM) we investigate the term structure of interest rates. The proposed methodology is applied to monthly interest rates for four southern European countries: Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain from the introduction of the Euro to the recent European...