Using data on U.S. state and federal taxes and transfers over a quarter century, we estimate a regression model that yields the marginal effect of any shift of market income share from one quintile to another on the entire post tax, post-transfer income distribution. We identify exogenous income...

Das Papier untersucht die Rolle von Frühindikatoren bei der Erstellung von Konjunkturprognosen. Gegenstand der Analyse sind die Fragen: Welche Kriterien sollten Frühindikatoren generell erfüllen bzw. was sollten Frühindikatoren leisten? Inwieweit erfüllen die gängigen Indikatoren diese...

This paper examines the sources of fluctuations in inflation and output in two leading transitioneconomy candidates for admission to the European Union (EU), Poland and Hungary. Using a rational expectations, dynamic open economy aggregate supply- aggregate demand model, we consider real oil...

This paper describes a methodology to estimate the coefficients, to test specification hypotheses and to conduct policy exercises in multi-country VAR models with cross unit interdependencies, unit specific dynamics and time variations in the coefficients. The framework of analysis is Bayesian:...

This paper shows that the EMU has not affected historical characteristics of member countries’ business cycles and their cross-correlations. Member countries which had similar levels of GDP per-capita in the seventies have also experienced similar business cycles since then and no significant...

The paper examines the processes underlying economic fluctuations by investigating the volatility moderation of U.S. economy in the early 1980's. We decompose the volatility decline using a dynamic factor framework into a common stochastic trend, common transitory component and idiosyncratic...

This paper analyzes the effects of macro-economic conditions throughout life on the individual mortality rate. We estimate flexible duration models where the individual?s mortality rate depends on current conditions, conditions earlier in life (notably during childhood), calendar time, age,...

Die Gemeinschaftsdiagnose prognostiziert für Deutschland in diesem und im nächsten Jahr einen Aufschwung, den vor allem die Binnennachfrage trägt. Die Wirtschaftsforschungsinstitute befürchten allerdings, dass sich ein Konjunktureinbruch in Russland negativ auf das deutsche Wachstum...

This paper analyzes to what extent changes in monetary policy regimes influence the business cycle in a small open economy and investigates the impact of policy breaks on the estimation procedure. We estimate a DSGE model on Swedish data, explicitly taking into account the monetary regime change...

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...