Using a large linked employer-employee data set, this paper studies the extent to which employers insure workers against transitory and permanent firm-level shocks. Particular emphasis is given to the question of whether the amount of wage insurance depends on the nature of industrial relations....

We analyze what macroeconomic shocks affect the soundness of the German banking system and how this, in turn, feeds back into the macroeconomic environment. Recent turmoils on the international financial markets have shown very clearly that assessing the degree to which banks are vulnerable to...

When the current financial crisis has widened to a global economic crisis an urgent call for implementing financial markets and financial institutions in business cycle models emerged. By modelling commercial banks as a third type of economic agent, we are able to implement the feature of early...

Die vorliegende Arbeit untersucht, wie sich Angebots-, Nachfrage- und geldpolitische Schocks aus den Vereinigten Staaten auf Deutschland übertragen. Dabei wird ein so genanntes factor-augmented vector autoregressive model (FAVAR) auf einen neu zusammengestellten Datensatz mit mehr als 200...

This paper analyses information from survey data collected in the framework of the Eurosystem's Wage Dynamics Network (WDN) on patterns of firm-level adjustment to shocks. We document that the relative intensity and the character of price vs. cost and wage vs. employment adjustments in response...

Distinguishing pure supply effects from other determinants of price and quantity in the market for loans is a notoriously difficult problem. Using German data, we employ Bayesian vector autoregressive models with sign restrictions on the impulse response functions in order to enquire the role of...

The literature on unemployment has mostly focused on labor market issues while the impact of capital formation is largely neglected. Job-creation is often thought to be a matter of encouraging more employment on a given capital stock. In contrast, this paper explicitly deals with the long-run...

This paper presents a model of asymmetric (S,s) pricing. We investigate whether the asymmetry on micro level is carried over on macro level and what is the role of agent heterogeneity in the process. We look at two kinds of asymmetries: (i) asymmetric output responses monetary shocks and (ii)...

The implications of monetary unification for fiscal policies are discussed. The roles of nominal exchange rate flexibility in the presence of asymmetric national shocks and nominal price rigidities as an automatic stabilizer and source of disturbances to real economic performance are reviewed....

We provide empirical estimates of the risksharing and redistributive properties of fiscal equalization among the states of the German federation. Fiscal equalization serves as a mechanism to insure state budgets against asymmetric revenue shocks, but provides almost no insurance against regional...