We raise fundamental questions about macroeconomics relevant to escaping the financial and economic crisis and shifting to a sustainable economy. First, the feasibility of decoupling environmental pressure from aggregate income is considered. Decoupling as a single environmental strategy is...

Comprehensive modelling of the impact of taxes and tax policy options requires data on the impact at micro-level of both direct and indirect taxes. There are, however, limits on the amount of data that can be gathered by any one survey. With some exceptions, most notably the Living Costs and...

We study contracting between a consumer and an expert. The expert can invest in diagnosis to obtain a noisy signal about whether a low-cost service is sufficient or whether a high-cost treatment is required to solve the consumer's problem. This involves moral hazard because diagnosis effort and...

We propose a method for conducting inference on impulse responses in structural vector autoregressions (SVARs) when the impulse response is not point identified because the number of equality restrictions one can credibly impose is not sufficient for point identification and/or one imposes sign...

In diesem Papier wird eine Konjunkturbereinigung des öffentlichen Haushaltssaldos für Deutschland vorgestellt. In den bisher am meisten verbreiteten Ansätzen wird der Konjunktureinfluss über die Abweichung des Bruttoinlandsprodukts vom Trend oder von der Normalauslastung der Wirtschaft...

Im vorliegenden Papier wird der Frage nachgegangen, welche Anpassungsprozesse sich in einem Zielzonensystem – wie etwa dem WKM II – ergeben, wenn der reale Wechselkurs der Inlandswährung unter Aufwertungsdruck gerät. Die modelltheoretische Grundlage bildet das Krugman’sche Grundmodell...

Virtually all empirical firm-level studies on the demand for labor do not include labor cost in the econometric specification. This is due to the fact that business and innovation survey data usually lack information on labor cost. This paper shows how reliable skill-specific and firm-specific...

This paper introduces productivity-dependent firing costs into an otherwise standard endogenous separations matching model. We suggest an alternative to the standard fix cost approach and account for empirical evidence emphasizing that firing costs vary across workers. We show that the model...

We build quadratic labor adjustment costs into an otherwise standard New-Keynesian model of the business cycle and show that this increases output persistence in a similar vein as other models of labor market frictions. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that quadratic labor adjustment costs imply...

We introduce search and matching unemployment into a model of trade with differentiated goods and heterogeneous firms. Countries may differ with respect to size, geographical location, and labor market institutions. Contrary to the literature, our single-sector perspective pays special attention...