Ein allgemeiner, gesetzlicher Mindestlohn ist nach den Bundestagswahlen 2013 ein ganz wichtiges politisches Thema in Deutschland. So macht die SPD vor den Koalitionsverhandlungen mit den Unionsparteien die Einführung einer branchenübergreifenden Lohnuntergrenze von 8,50 Euro brutto pro Stunde...

Am 11. und 12. Juni 2013 hat das Bundesverfassungsgericht Experten zur Krisenpolitik der EZB angehört. Dabei ging es um die Frage, ob oder inwieweit die EZB durch das Outright-Monetary-Transactions-Programm (OMT) Kompetenzen beansprucht, die ihr nicht übertragen worden sind. Wir...

The Baltic states were arguably the countries most severely affected by the global financial crisis. This article discusses the boom preceding the crisis, the ensuing austerity policies and the economic effects of these policies. All three countries maintained fixed exchange rates, but the...

Most countries exhibit large and persistent geographical differences in wages, income and unemployment rates. A growing class of place based policies attempt to address these differences through public investments and subsidies that target disadvantaged neighborhoods, cities or regions. Place...

Paid maternity leave has gained greater salience in the past few decades as mothers have increasingly entered the workforce. Indeed, the median number of weeks of paid leave to mothers among OECD countries was 14 in 1980, but had risen to 42 by 2011. We assess the case for paid maternity leave,...

This paper offers quasi experimental evidence of the existence of spillover effects of UI extensions using a unique program that extended unemployment benefits drastically for a subset of workers in selected regions of Austria. We use non-eligible unemployed in treated regions, and a...

Most dynamic trade models assume steady state or balanced growth. This paper argues while this can be done in a single region model or a model without trade, the steady state assumption is problematic in a multi-regional setting with trade interactions. This paper shows the consequences of...

This paper studies the relationship between retirement and mortality, using a unique administrative data set covering the full population of Norway. We make use of a series of retirement policy changes in Norway, which reduced the retirement age for a group of workers but not for others. By...

The study presents a macro-finance model to analyze the impacts of a fiscal policy shock in the Brazilian term structure of interest rate in the period 1999-2010. Fiscal policy explains a higher proportion of the long-term interest rate variance (25% of the five years rate) comparing to the...