Current explanations why a growing economy necessarily goes through booms and recessions predict countercyclical R&D investment. As this is very controversial from an empirical perspective, a stochastic Poisson model of endogenous business cycles and growth is presented where the determinants of...

Current explanations why a growing economy necessarily goes through booms and recessions predict countercyclical R&D investment. As this is very controversial from an empirical perspective, a stochastic Poissonmodel of endogenous business cycles and growth is presented where the determinants of...

Cyclical components are analytically computed in a theoretical model of stochastic endogenous fluctuations and growth. Volatility is shown to depend on the speed of convergence of the cyclical component, the expected length of a cycle and on the altitude of the slump. Taxes affect these channels...

Rare and randomly occurring events are important features of the economic world. In continuous time they can easily be modeled by Poisson processes. Analyzing optimal behavior in such a setup requires the appropriate version of the change of variables formula and the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman...

This paper examines the role of bequests and of taxation on bequests for the distribution of wealth. We investigate a model with overlapping generations and heterogenous households where parents derive utility directly from their bequests. Using the coefficient of variation as measure of...

We investigate how continental European unemployment can be reduced without reducing unemployment benefits and without reducing the net income of low-wage earners. Lower unemployment replacement rates reduce unemployment, the net wage and unemployment benefits. A lower tax on labour increases...

One of the main results of the literature on the effects of uncertainty on trade states that uncertainty should not matter in the presence of well developed forward markets. Empirical studies, however, do not support this result. We derive the demand for forward cover in a small open economy...

Getting a tenured position in economics in Germany is viewed as a random outcome where the probability of tenure depends on the quantity and quality of publications, age and years since PhD. We measure publications both in units of Top 5 journals and in units of the European Economic Review...

Rare and randomly occurring events are important features of the economic world. In continuous time they can easily be modeled by Poisson processes. Analyzing optimal behavior in such a setup requires the appropriate version of the change of variables formula and the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman...

There is a huge literature on the effects of uncertainty on trade levels. One very strong result of that literature is that uncertainty should not matter, as long as well developed forward markets exist. The empirical implications of this result, however, are hard to find in the data. We model...