Agri-food systems in developing countries are undergoing a rapid transformation, characterized by modernizing supply chains and the rising importance of highervalue products. Participation of smallholder farmers in the emerging modern and high-value marketing channels is considered a crucial...

We analyze the feedback mechanisms between economic downturns and financial stress for several euro area countries. Our study employs newly constructed financial condition indices that incorporate banking variables extensively. We apply a non-linear Vector Smooth Transition Autoregressive...

We show that an otherwise standard one-sector real business cycle model with variable capital utilization and mild increasing returns-to-scale is able to generate qualitatively as well as quantitatively realistic aggregate fluctuations driven by news shocks to two formulations of future...

Many researchers have recommended to increase public debt in the aftermath of the financial crisis in order to relax borrowing constraints for private households. This advice is based on the common assumption that borrowing conditions of private agents are exogenous to public policy. We study...

This paper studies the effect of labor market reform on the welfare cost of business cycles. Motivated by the German labor market reforms of 2003-2005, the so-called Hartz reforms, the paper focuses on two labor market institutions: the unemployment insurance system determining search incentives...

We integrate systemic financial instability in an empirical macroeconomic model for the euro area. We find that at times of widespread financial instability the macroeconomy functions fundamentally differently from tranquil times. We employ a richly specified Markov-Switching...

We analyze real interest rate convergence among six industrialized countries in between 1975M1-2011M3 within a multi-country framework by means of a dynamic latent factor model. The real interest rates are decomposed into permanent and transitory factors, and country-specific components....

In the academic literature, the economic interpretation of stock market volatility is inherently ambivalent, being considered an indicator of either information flow or uncertainty. We show in a stylized model economy that both views suggest volatility-dependent cross-market spillovers. If...

In this paper, we analyse nominal exchange rate and price dynamics after risk shocks with short-term interest rates constrained by the zero lower bound (ZLB). We show with a stylized theoretical model that temporary risk shocks may lead to permanent shifts of the exchange rate and the price...

This paper proposes a latent dynamic factor model for low- as well as high-dimensional realized covariance matrices of stock returns. The approach is based on the matrix logarithm and allows for flexible dynamic dependence patterns by combining common latent factors driven by HAR dynamics and...