This paper examines the FDI flows towards two regions in the periphery of Europe: the Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs) and the countries of Southern Europe. We investigate whether evidence exists for FDI diversion from Southern Europe to the CEECs. A cursory observation of recent...

Probit models are employed to evaluate leading indicators for Germany's recessions. The predictive power of leading indicators is found to be lower than assumed in previous studies. Although, monetary variables provide the best predictive power for recessions, survey data and order inflows show...

This paper elaborates on the relative importance of sectoral shocks for real economic activity in Germany. Implications of multisectoral real business cycle models are examined by resorting to testing techniques based on stock market returns. The empirical evidence is obtained by calculating...

This paper provides a political-economy explanation of the degree of centralization in economic policy making. To determine which policies are to be centralized, regions select representatives who then negotiate the degree of centralization and the regional cost shares of centrally decided...

Die vorliegende Untersuchung stellt die technischen Grundlagen und die Marktordnung für den internationalen Handel mit Dienstleistungen der Informationstechnologie dar; sie analysiert und bewertet die resultierenden Handelsbarrieren. Die Funktionsweise des Internets (Netzaufbau, Adress- und...

We provide a microfounded account of imperfect information in a dynamic general equilibrium model by describing heterogeneous households that acquire information only through their participation in markets. Thus incomplete markets will imply incomplete information. We solve the model taking full...

Macro-stress testing studies often rely on rather short sample periods due to the limited availability of banking data. They may fail to appropriately account for the cyclicality in the interaction between the banking system and macroeconomic developments. In this paper we use a newly...

Persistently high unemployment rates in Germany have led to a long-running controversy on the causes of the unemployment problem. This paper aims to re­view the contribution of Keynesian and monetarist theories to this controversy and explores empirically their implications for the explanation...

The member states of the European Union have given up sovereignty in quite a number of policy areas and subjected themselves to joint decisionmaking at the European level. Policy instruments are no longer available nationally in many policy areas, including monetary policy, trade policy, the...

This paper reviews the analytics of the effects of globalization on the Phillips curve and the utility-based objective function of the central bank. It demonstrates that in an endogenous-policy set up, when trade in goods is liberalized, financial openness increases, and in- and out-labor...