The recent increase in Chinese house prices has led to concerns that China is vulnerable to asset price shocks. In this paper, we apply recently developed recursive unit root tests to spot the beginning and the end of potential speculative bubbles in Chinese house price cycles. Overall, we find...

The standard literature on working time has modelled the decisions of firms in a deterministic framework in which firms can choose between employment and overtime (given mandated standard hours). Contrary to this approach, we follow the real options approach, which allows us to investigate the...

We study an overlapping generations model of human capital accumulation with threshold effects using regional data for West Germany. Our basic goal is to shed light on the growth of West German regions. The paper finds that the relative income distribution appears to be stratifying into a...

The paper bases itself on recent theoretical writings in growth economics that empha-size the effects of both own R&D efforts and of interregional technology spillovers on regions´ productivity. We propose robust estimation techniques to evaluate the R&D spillovers across West German functional...

The paper sheds light on the interplay between monetary policy, the commercial banking sector and the shadow banking sector in mainland China by means of a nonlinear stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model with occasionally binding constraints. In particular, we analyze the impacts of...

The design of optimal environmental policy inherits model uncertainty.We investigate the consequences in a simple linear model, where the aim of the policymaker is to stabilise the atmospheric content of carbon. We study how decisionmakers’ concerns about robustness alters policy using the...

This paper provides a modelling framework for evaluating the exchange rate dyna-mics of a target zone regime with undisclosed bands. We generalize the literature to allow for asymmetric one-sided regimes. Market participants' beliefs concerning an undisclosed band change as they learn more about...

The quintessence of recent natural science studies is that the 2°C target can only be achieved with massive emission reductions in the next few years. The central twist of this paper is the addition of this limited time to act into a non-perpetual real options framework analysing optimal...

In this paper we analyse the impact of institutional uncertainty on vertical foreign direct investment (FDI) strategies. We also consider the impact of economic integration upon FDI decisions. The paper follows the real options approach, which allows investigating the value to a firm of waiting...

This paper accounts for China?s economic growth since 1980 in a uni-fied endogenous growth model in which a sequencing of physical capital accumula-tion, human capital ac-cumulation and innovation drives the rise in China?s aggre-gate income. The first stage is characterized by physical capital...