This paper discusses whether the implementation of a tax on short-term capital flows can make the transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe less vulnerable to adverse external shocks and to sudden withdrawals of foreign capital. The following section outlines the main arguments which...

This research applies data from the Livingston survey to study the time variation in the sentiment of U.S. stock-market forecasters. A Panel Smooth Transition Regression (STR) model is estimated to identify the importance of market conditions summarized by stock-market misalignments and recent...

We use a machine-learning approach known as Boosted Regression Trees (BRT) to reexamine the usefulness of selected leading indicators for predicting recessions. We estimate the BRT approach on German data and study the relative importance of the indicators and their marginal effects on the...

Models recently studied by Farmer (2012, 2013, 2015) predict that, due to labor-market frictions and "animal spirits", stock-market fluctuations should Granger cause fluctuations of the unemployment rate. We performed several Granger-causality tests on more than half a century of data of German...

In letzter Zeit stand häufig der sogenannte Gender Pay Gap in der Diskussion. Der Gender Pay Gap besagt, dass der durchschnittliche Lohnsatz von Frauen unter dem durchschnittlichen Lohnsatz von Männern liegt. Doch was sind genau die Hintergründe und Ursachen dieses Phänomens? In diesem...

Summary The paper uses German annual data covering the period 1969-2000 to present evidence on the link between aggregate inflation and the skewness of the distribution of relative price changes. Our empirical results are mixed. Our regression-based analyses suggest that the skewness of the...

Summary Exchange rates have been found to be more volatile than underlying macroeconomic fundamentals. Researchers have argued that the empirically observed high exchange-rate volatility may result from herd behavior of foreign-exchange traders and forecasters. We sketch a standard model that...

Abstract Economists use three types of models to describe volunteer labour supply: the public-goods model, the private-consumption model, and the human-capital model. We used data from an online survey questionnaire of volunteers working for the German Red Cross to study the extent to which...

Globalization may impose a double-burden on low-skilled workers. On the one hand, the relative supply of low-skilled labor increases. This suppresses wages of low-skilled workers and/or increases their unemployment rates. On the other hand, low-skilled workers typically face more limited access...