The recovery of the German economy needs more time. Ongoing precautionary measures to protect against infection as well as the supply bottlenecks will slow down the catch-up process in the winter. Especially in those service sector that have been particularly affected by the pandemic the...

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...

A standard model of activist macroeconomic policy derives a monetary reaction rule by assuming that governments have performance objectives, but are constrained by an augmented Phillips curve. In addition to monetary policy governments apply a variety of instruments to influence inflation and...

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...

German GDP is expected to increase by 1.8 percent (2015), 2.1 percent (2016), and 2.3 percent (2017). Economic activity is driven by consumer spending that increases in the upcoming years by about 2 percent per year due to strong increases in real disposable income.