In this paper we discuss a number of challenges for structural macroeconomic models in the light of the Great Recession and its aftermath. It shows that a benchmark DSGE model that shares many features with models currently used by central banks and large international institutions has...

This chapter develops a toolkit of neoclassical macroeconomic models, and applies these models to the U.S. economy from 1929 through 2014. We first filter macroeconomic time series into business cycle and long-run components, and show that the long-run component is typically much larger than the...

In the recent economic debate on the design of fiscal policy in Germany it is gene rally agreed that the total hurden of taxes and levies has to be reduced. In this paper, arguments that form the basis of this claim are evaluated within a calihrated Real Business Cycle model. The analysis shows...

In this paper we discuss a number of challenges for structural macroeconomic models in the light of the Great Recession and its aftermath. It shows that a benchmark DSGE model that shares many features with models currently used by central banks and large international institutions has...

This paper provides a detailed description of the Eurace@Unibi model, which has been developed as a versatile tool for economic policy analysis. The model explicitly incorporates the decentralized interaction of heterogeneous agents across different sectors and regions. The modeling of...