We analyse the link between income distribution and the current account through a descriptive analysis for the G7 countries and a series of panel estimations for the G7 countries and a larger sample of 20 countries for the period 1972-2007. We find that, firstly, rising personal inequality leads...

Household surveys like the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) notoriously underestimate the degree of income and wealth inequality at the upper end of the distribution. A new approach developed by Thomas Piketty and co-authors therefore analyses tax return data in an attempt at better measuring...

Freiwillige Haushaltbefragungen wie das Sozioökonomische Panel (SOEP) unterschätzen tendenziell die Ungleichheit von Einkommen und Vermögen. Die von Thomas Piketty und anderen etablierte Forschungsrichtung wertet daher zur Bestimmung der Ungleichheit am oberen Ende der Verteilung amtliche...

We analyse the bank interest rate pass-through in the euro area for the period 1999:1 - 2009:11, relating market interest rates to bank retail rates of comparable maturities. We first estimate single equation error correction models for seven interest rate categories and ten euro area countries...

In his widely discussed book "Fault Lines" (2010), Raghuram Rajan argues that many U.S. consumers have reacted to the decline in their relative permanent incomes since the early 1980s by reducing saving and increasing debt. This has temporarily kept private consumption and thus aggregate demand...

Various deviations from the Permanent Income consumption model with rational expectations have been discussed in the literature, including loss aversion and liquidity constraints. In the existing literature, these two types of consumption asymmetry are usually considered as mutually exclusive....

We apply the asymmetric ARDL model advanced by Shin, Yu and Greenwood-Nimmo (2009) to the analysis of the patterns of pass-through from policy-controlled interest rates to a variety of longer-term rates in the U.S. and Germany. Our results reveal three main phenomena. Firstly, while the e®ect...

Despite the biggest economic slump in Germany since the Second World War, employment did not decrease. In other European countries, which have even been hit less hard, employment started to decrease significantly. This 'employment miracle' is a result of the high internal flexibility of the...

En dépit de la plus grave crise économique que le pays a connue depuis la seconde guerre mondiale, l'emploi n'a pas reculé en Allemagne. Au contraire : alors que l'emploi a fortement régressé dans de nombreux autres pays, il a légèrement progressé en Allemagne. Ce " miracle " s'explique...

This article is centred around the notions of shareholder value orientation and financialisation. Shareholder value orientation is reflected by a high dividend payout ratio applied by firms and the reluctance of firms to finance physical investment via new equity issues. Financialisation is the...