We document the empirical fact that asset prices in the consumption-goods and investment-goods sector behave almost identically in the US economy. In order to derive the cyclical behavior of the equity returns in these two sectors, we onsider a standard two-sector real-business cycle model with...

This paper investigates whether information complementarities can explain the strong patterns of sectoral comovement observed empirically. It tests the theoretical model by Veldkamp and Wolfers (2007), which suggests that firms' output decisions are based on aggregate information rather than...

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...

This paper investigates the behaviour of employers' monopsony power and workers' wages over the business cycle. Using German administrative linked employer--employee data for the years 1985--2010 and an estimation framework based on duration models, we construct a time series of the firm-level...

One of the roots of the recent global financial crisis has been seen in the design of subprime mortgage contract leading to high sensitivity of such type of loans to house price changes. The market of subprime loans, especially in the last years preceding the crisis, has been highly financed by...

According to empirical studies, the life cycle of labor supply volatility exhibits a U-shaped pattern. This may lead to the conclusion that demographic change induces a drop in output volatility. We present an overlapping generations model that replicates the empirically observed pattern and...

How much have the dynamics of US time series and in the particular the transmission of innovations to monetary policy instruments changed over the last century? The answers to these questions that this paper gives are "A lot." and "Probably less than you think.", respectively. We use vector...

We show that TFP reacts counter-cyclically to macroeconomic shocks, which we identify by imposing sign restrictions. Counterfactual simulations, based on a New Keynesian DSGE model, show that firms manage to employ labor more efficiently during downturns, which leads to a muted drop in the...

We study the forecasting performance of three alternative large scale approaches for German key macroeconomic variables using a dataset that consists of 123 variables in quarterly frequency. These three approaches handle the dimensionality problem evoked by such a large dataset by aggregating...