This paper studies the economic and political effects of a large trade shock in agriculture – the grain invasion from the Americas – in Prussia during the first globalization (1871-1913). We show that this shock accelerated the structural change in the Prussian economy through migration of...

Does the current account improve or deteriorate following a monetary policy expansion? We examine this issue theoretically and empirically. We show that a standard open economy DSGE model predicts that the current account response to a monetary policy shock depends on the degree of economic...

We assess the effects of financial shocks on inflation, and to what extent financial shocks can account for the "missing disinflation" during the Great Recession. We apply a vector autoregressive model to US data and identify financial shocks through sign restrictions. Our main finding is that...

We draw on two decades of historical data to analyze how regional labor markets in West Germany adjusted to one of the largest forced population movements in history, the mass inflow of eight million German expellees after World War II. The expellee inflow was distributed very asymmetrically...

We analyse the macroeconomic effects of exogenous contractions in bank lending to non-financial corporations in the Euro Area, Germany, France, Italy and Spain using a Bayesian vector autoregressive model with endogenous hyperparameter selection and identification via sign restrictions. We focus...