In a study of European growth in the interwar period, the Swedish economist Ingvar Svennilson integrated a Keynesian theory of cumulative growth with a Schumpeterian analysis of economic transformation. Svennilson emphasised that innovations and the use of new technologies had been stimulated by...

We study the implications of having different sources of nominal rigidities on the relationship between productivity growth and shocks volatility in a model with pro-cyclical R&D and imperfect competition in goods and labour markets. We show that the effects of uncertainty on long-term growth...

We investigate labor productivity dynamics amongst British businesses in the wake of the credit crisis of 2007/8. The external restructuring of firms (i.e. changes in market share, firm entry and exit) contributed to a fall in productivity growth relative to trend amongst small businesses in...

We investigate labor productivity dynamics amongst British businesses in the wake of the credit crisis of 2007/8. The external restructuring of firms (i.e. changes in market share, firm entry and exit) contributed to a fall in productivity growth relative to trend amongst small businesses in...

Expectations matter for economic activity. To the extent that they are fundamentally unwarranted, they represent "undue optimism or pessimism" (Pigou, 1927). In this paper, we identify empirically the effect of undue optimism/pessism ("optimism shocks") on economic activity. In a first step, we...

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...

This paper analyzes which factors are driving the ZEW Indicator of Economic Sentiment. Using the results of a poll among survey participants as well as Granger causality tests we identify three groups of influence factors: other sentiment indicators, financial variables and real economy data. In...

In this paper the accuracy of a wide range of German business cycle forecasters is assessed for the past 10 years. For this purpose, a data set is used comprising forecasts published on a monthly basis by Consensus Economics. The application of several descriptive as well as statistical measures...

In this paper we analyze the macroeconomic forecasts of the Consensus Forecasts for 12 countries over the period from 1996 to 2006 regarding bias and information efficiency. A pooled approach is employed which permits the evaluation of all forecasts for each target variable over 24 horizons...