In January 2015, Germany introduced a federal, statutory minimum wage of 8.50 € per hour. This study evaluates the effects of this policy on regular and marginal employment and on welfare dependency. Based on county-level administrative data, this study uses the difference-in-differences...

Increasing mothers’ labor supply is a key policy challenge in many OECD countries. Germany recently introduced a generous parental benefit that allows for strong consumption smoothing after childbirth and, by taking into account opportunity costs of childbearing, incentivizes working women to...

Increasing mothers' labor supply is a key policy challenge in many OECD countries. Germany recently introduced a generous parental benefit that allows for strong consumption smoothing after childbirth and, by taking into account opportunity costs of childbearing, incentivizes working women to...

A growing empirical literature has shown, based on structural vector autoregressions (SVARs) identified through sign restrictions, that unconventional monetary policies implemented after the outbreak of the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) had expansionary macroeconomic effects. In a recent paper,...

A growing empirical literature has shown, based on structural vector autoregressions (SVARs) identified through sign restrictions, that unconventional monetary policies implemented after the outbreak of the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) had expansionary macroeconomic effects. In a recent paper,...

We assess the effects of the ECB's recent unconventional monetary policy measures by estimating a global VAR that exploits panel variation among all euro area economies and explicitly takes into account cross-country interdependencies. Unconventional monetary policy measures have beneficial...