Has heightened uncertainty been a major contributor to the Great Recession and the slow recovery in the U.S.? To answer this question, we identify exogenous changes in six uncertainty proxies and quantify their contributions to GDP growth and the unemployment rate. Our results are threefold....

Dieses Papier stellt das Verfahren des Sachverständigenrates zur Bestimmung des Produktionspotenzials für die deutsche Wirtschaft vor. Im Vergleich zur Methode der EU-Kommission berücksichtigt der Ansatz des Sachverständigenrates in einem stärkeren Ausmaß demografische Faktoren. Darüber...

In early 2013 rumors about the Euro-appreciation gained momentum, which may lead to decreases in exports and increases in imports of the member states. Therefore, we investigate the impact of changes in the nominal Euro exchange rate vis-à-vis major currencies on export and import performance...

Uncertainty about the future path of inflation affects consumption, saving and investment decisions as well as wage negotiations and price setting of firms. These decisions are based on inflation expectations which are a key determinant of inflation in the New Keynesian Phillips Curve. In this...

Time preferences vary by age. Notably, according to experimental studies, senior citizens tend to discount future payoffs more heavily than working-age individuals. Based on these findings, we hypothesize that demographic change has contributed to the cut-back in government-financed investment...

House price cycles may have considerable macroeconomic effects even if they evolve heterogeneous across local markets. In this paper we use a panel Markov switching model allowing for time-varying volatility to analyze national and state level house price regimes for the US jointly. Our approach...

In this study we introduce a new indicator for private consumption based on search query time series provided by Google Trends. The indicator is based on factors extracted from consumption-related search categories of the Google Trends application Insights for Search. The forecasting performance...