In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, the state of macroeconomic modeling and the use of macroeconomic models in policy analysis has come under heavy criticism. Macroeconomists in academia and policy institutions have been blamed for relying too much on a particular class of...

The Euro Area is characterized by little variation in unemployment and strongly procyclical labor productivity. We capture both characteristics in a New Keynesian business cycle model with labor search frictions, where labor can vary along three margins: employment, hours, and effort. We...

German GDP is expected to increase by 1.8 percent (2015), 2.1 percent (2016), and 2.3 percent (2017). Economic activity is driven by consumer spending that increases in the upcoming years by about 2 percent per year due to strong increases in real disposable income.

The world economy is expanding at a more moderate pace with growth momentum continuing to shift from emerging to advanced economies. World GDP will increase by 3.3 per cent this year – even some-what less than the already modest growth in the recent past. For 2016 and 2017 we expect growth to...

We propose a simple modification of the time series filter by Hamilton (2018b) that yields reliable and economically meaningful real-time output gap estimates. The original filter relies on 8-quarter ahead forecasts errors of an autoregression. While this approach yields a cyclical component of...

The standard search model of unemployment predicts, under realistic assumptions about household preferences, that disembodied technological progress leads to higher steady-state unemployment. This prediction is at odds with the 1970s experience of slow productivity growth and high unemployment...

We estimate a Markow-switching dynamic factor model with three states based on six leading business cycle indicators for Germany preselected from a broader set using the Elastic Net soft-thresholding rule. The three states represent expansions, normal recessions and severe recessions. We show...