Stylized facts suggest that output volatility in OECD countries has declined in recent years. However, the causes and the nature of this decline have so far been analyzed mainly for the United States. In this paper, we analyze whether structural breaks in the dynamics and the volatility of 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 present paper uses German annual data covering the period 1969-2000 to present evidence on the link between aggregate inflation and the higher-order moments of the distribution of relative price changes. Our empirical findings confirm predictions of contributions to the theoretical...

The German unemployment rate shows strong signs if non-stationarity over the course of the previous decades. This is in line with an insider-outsider model under full hysteresis. We applied a "theory-guided view" to the data using the structural VAR model as developed by Balmaseda, Dolado and...

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 cyclicality of real wages has important implications for the validity of competing business cycle theories. However, the empirical evidence on the aggregate level is inconclusive. Using a threshold vector autoregressive model for the US and Germany to condition the relationship between real...