Der Kurs der Finanzpolitik in Deutschland hat sich im Verlauf des Jahres 1999 geändert. Ausgabenkürzungen wurden durchgesetzt, deutliche Steuersenkungen sind geplant. Die Finanzpolitik fördert das Wachstum der Wirtschaft. Allerdings sind die Steuersenkungen bei weitem nicht so groß wie oft...

We consider two channels via which foreign inputs into industrial production may lead to productivity effects. The first one concerns dynamic externalities between firms which share technical and organizational knowledge which is vital for the productivity growth of a particular industry. We...

In the recent literature, several hypotheses have been put forward in order to explain the decline of contributions in repeated public good games. We present results of an experiment which allows to evaluate these hypotheses. The main characteristics of our experimental design are a variation of...

The labour markets in the developed countries have experienced two fundamental changes in recent years. Firstly, high-skilled workers have gained at the expense of low-skilled workers, which manifests itself in a rising skill premium and/or a rising disparity in the unemployment rates of these...

It is common knowledge that the standard New Keynesian model is not able to generate a persistent response in output to temporary monetary shocks. We show that this shortcoming can be remedied in a simple and intuitively appealing way through the introduction of labor turnover costs (such as...

A shortcoming of most empirical studies on aggregate exports is their exclusive focus on the demand side. Moreover, the effect of globalization is often neglected leading to implausibly high income elasticities. This paper models export demand and supply simultaneously and incorporates a new...

Inflation and unemployment are central issues in macroeconomics. While progress has been made on these issues recently using models that explicitly incorporate search-type frictions, existing models analyze either unemployment or inflation in isolation. We develop a framework to analyze...

This paper seeks to contribute to the ongoing controversy on the distributional effects of structural reforms in developing countries. To this end, we set up a small-scale macroeconomic model of a dual economy to capture the transmission mechanisms through which the deregulation of product and...

We estimate educational production functions for seven Eastern European transition countries, using student-level TIMSS data for lower secondary education. The results show substantial effects of student background on educational performance and a much lower impact of resources and the...

Models in which firms use rules of thumb or partial indexing in their price setting have become prominent in the recent monetary policy literature. The extent to which these firms adjust their prices to lagged inflation has been taken as fixed. We consider the implications of firms choosing the...