Countries with the highest labor productivity overwhelmingly lie in the world's temperate climatic zones far away from the equator. The question we address is whether climatic conditions as measured by distance from the equator remain correlated with labor productivity after other variables are...

An overlapping generations model is set up in this paper to analyze social security policy in a representative democracy with asymmetric information. The model considers not only redistribution between generations but also redistribution within generations according to individual labor incomes....

When taken to examine disinflation monetary policies, the current workhorse DSGE model of business cycle fluctuations successfully accounts for the main stylized facts in terms of recessionary effects and sacrifice ratio. We complement the transitional analysis of the short-run costs with a...

We use the event-study methodology to analyze the effectiveness of the foreign exchange market interventions conducted by the Swiss National Bank (SNB) during the period from 1986 through 1995. We find some evidence that the interventions of the SNB had an impact on exchange rate dynamics. The...

In this paper, we show that strategic complementarities–such as firm-specific factors or quasikinked demand–have crucial implications for the design of monetary policy and for the welfare costs of output and inflation variability. Recent research has mainly used log-linear approximations to...

This paper analyzes, within a regional growth model, the impact of productive governmental policy and integration on the spatial distribution of economic activity. Integration is understood as enhancing territorial cooperation between the regions, and it describes the extent to which one region...

Translated to a cross-country context, the Solow model (Solow, 1956) predicts that international differences in steady state output per person are due to international differences in technology for a constant capital output ratio. However, most of the cross-country growth literature that refers...

Der Abstand zwischen dem potentiellen Nettoarbeitseinkommen und dem Sozialhilfeanspruch (Lohnabstand) wird für verschiedene Haushaltstypen gemessen. Er ist im Jahr 2001 für Haushalte, die aus drei oder mehr Personen bestehen, gering. Der Lohnabstand hat in den vergangenen 40 Jahren abgenommen....

In diesem Papier werden eine Reihe von Frühindikatoren für die Entwicklung der Ausrüstungs-, Wirtschaftsbau- und Wohnungsbauinvestitionen in Deutschland untersucht. Die Indikatoren werden auf Basis theoretischer Erwägungen oder wegen ihres technischen Zusammenhangs zur Investitionstätigkeit...

The terrorist attacks of September 11 have challenged the view that the U.S. economy is on the brink of recovery. This article discusses the effects of the attacks on real GDP taking the Kiel InstituteÂ’s forecast of September 10 as the baseline scenario. The focus is on assessing the direct...