The recovery of the German economy is interrupted. The main reasons are the second Covid wave and the shutdown measures that have been implemented since November. Since these measures will, at least to some extent, probably remain in place for some time to come, GDP will decline in the final...

The German economy is recovering from the COVID-19 shock. With the successful containment of the coronavirus, output has quickly rebounded from its trough in April and has made up a good part of the losses within a few months. This strong momentum essentially reflects the normalization of...

Traditionally, economic growth and business cycles have been treated independently. However, the dependence of GDP levels on its history of shocks, what economists refer to as 'hysteresis,' argues for unifying the analysis of growth and cycles. In this paper, we review the recent empirical and...

The second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic has interrupted the recovery in Germany. GDP is set to decline in the first quarter of this year, after stagnating in the previous quarter. However, with the vaccination campaign progressing, the economic burden of the pandemic will ease and the recovery...

Crises are a major driving force behind cooperation in the European Union. This holds also for monetary and fiscal policy. During severe crises, cooperation has been enlarged and intensified. The recent covid-19 pandemic is a clear example of this pattern. The pandemic has had huge impact on the...

Policy makers need to separate between temporary demand-driven shocks and permanent shocks in order to design optimal aggregate demand policies. In this paper we study the case of a central bank that ignores the presence of hysteresis when identifying shocks. By assuming that all low-frequency...