A labor matching model with nominal rigidities can match short-run movements in labor's share with some success. However, it cannot explain much of the behavior of employment, vacancies, and job flows in postwar US data without resorting to additional shocks beyond monetary policy and...

National borders substantially matter in passenger air traffic. Empirical estimates based upon a new data set on domestic and international departures from German airports indicate that the German border reduces air traffic activity by a factor of four to five. This result adds a further piece...

This paper analyzes how major external shocks and policy reforms affect Bolivia's ability to achieve pro-poor growth. Employing a recursive-dynamic CGE model, it considers three different scenarios: an optimistic baseline scenario that roughly extrapolates the situation prevailing before the...

We analyze the importance of global shocks for the global economy and national policy makers. More specifically, we investigate whether monetary policy has become less effective in the wake of financial globalization. We also examine whether there is increasing uncertainty for central banks due...

We introduce banks, modeled as in Diamond and Rajan (JoF 2000 or JPE 2001), into a standard DSGE model and use this framework to study the role of banks in the transmission of shocks, the effects of monetary policy when banks are exposed to runs, and the interplay between monetary policy and...

When the world economy was recently hit by a severe recession, governments all over the world reacted by initiating stimulus packages. Some countries (among them, most notably, China and the US) tried to put special emphasis on their home industries by including Buy local'' clauses into the...

Is time-varying firm-level uncertainty a major cause or amplifier of the business cycle? This paper investigates this question in the context of a heterogeneous-firm RBC model with persistent firm-level productivity shocks and lumpy capital adjustment, where cyclical changes in uncertainty...