I quantify the importance of financial structure, labor market rigidities and industry mix for cross-country asymmetries in monetary transmission. To do so, I determine how closely the impulse responses to a monetary policy shock obtained from country-specific vectorautoregressive (VAR) models...

In this paper we study the drivers of fluctuations in the Irish housing market by developing a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model of Ireland as a member of the European Monetary Union (EMU). We estimate the model with Bayesian methods using time series for both Ireland and the...

We analyze the interaction of stock market movements and politics in Germany. In contrast to the empirical evidence available for the U.S., we do not find that German stock market returns tend to be higher during liberal than during conservative governments. Also in contrast to results for the...

This paper elaborates on the relative importance of sectoral shocks for real economic activity in Germany. Implications of multisectoral real business cycle models are examined by resorting to testing techniques based on stock market returns. The empirical evidence is obtained by calculating...

During the last two decades, the degree of openness of national financial systems has increased substantially. At the same time, asymmetries in information and other financial market frictions have remain prevalent. We study both empirically and theoretically the implications of the opening up...

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...

Anglo-Saxon countries have been successful in the 1990s concerning labor market performance compared to the former role models Germany and Japan. This reversal in relative economic performance might be related to idiosyncracies in financial markets with bank-based financial markets as in Germany...

We show empirically that survey-based measures of expected inflation are significant and strong predictors of future aggregate stock returns in several industrialized countries both in-sample and out-of-sample. By empirically discriminating between competing sources of this return predictability...

Is real investment fully determined by fundamentals or is it sometimes affected by stock market misvaluation? We introduce three new tests that: measure the reaction of investment to sales shocks for firms that may be overvalued; use Fama-MacBeth regressions to determine whether overinvestment...

Consumption risk sharing among U.S. federal states increases in booms and decreases in recessions. We find that small firms' access to credit markets plays an important role in explaining this stylized fact: business cycle fluctuations in aggregate risk sharing are more pronounced in states in...