Did the increase in counterparty risk perception in the interbank market since autumn 2007 contribute to the severe contraction of the US economy? To address this question we introduce interbank market uncertainty in a DSGE model with frictional financial intermediation. Interbank uncertainty is...

Several formal methods have been proposed to check identification in DSGE models via (i) the autocovariogram (Iskrev 2010), (ii) the spectral density (Komunjer and Ng 2011; Qu and Tkachenko 2012), or (iii) Bayesian indicators (Koop et al 2012). Even though all methods seem similar, there has been no...

On 5-6 September 2012 SUERF held its 30th Colloquium "States, Banks, and the Financing of the Economy" at the University of Zürich, Switzerland. The papers included in this SUERF Study are based on contributions to the Colloquium. All the chapters in this publication discuss from different...

We offer a new explanation as to why international trade is so volatile in response to economic shocks. Our approach combines the uncertainty shock idea of Bloom (2009) with a model of trade, extending the idea to the open economy. Firms import intermediate inputs from home or foreign suppliers,...

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...

Expectations matter for economic activity. To the extent that they are fundamentally unwarranted, they represent "undue optimism or pessimism" (Pigou, 1927). In this paper, we identify empirically the effect of undue optimism/pessism ("optimism shocks") on economic activity. In a first step, we...

Mixed-data sampling (MIDAS) regressions allow to estimate dynamic equations that explain a low-frequency variable by high-frequency variables and their lags. To account for temporal instabilities in this relationship, this paper discusses an extension to MIDAS with time-varying parameters, which...