We empirically investigate the costs and benefits of going from low inflation to price stability in the case of Germany. Recent empirical evidence on the sacrifice ratio suggests that the break-even point at which the permanent benefits of reducing the trend rate of inflation by 2 percentage...

Much of the current discussion promoting apprenticeship programs in the U.S. proceeds as if it is simply a matter of historical accident or lack of imagination which has hindered human capital investment by U.S. firms. However, the cause may be rooted more deeply in our labor market...

This paper estimates a dynamic structural model of discrete R&D investment and quantifies its cost and long-run benefit for German manufacturing firms. The dynamic model incorporates linkages between the firm's R&D choice, product and process innovations, and future productivity and profits. The...

We present an econometric method for estimating the parameters of a diffusion model from discretely sampled data. The estimator is transparent, adaptive, and inherits the asymptotic properties of the generally unattainable maximum likelihood estimator. We use this method to estimate a new...

Regime-switching models are well suited to capture the non-linearities in interest rates. This paper examines the econometric performance of regime-switching models for interest rate data from the US, Germany and the UK. There is strong evidence supporting the presence of regime switches but...

This paper is a first attempt at evaluating the determinants of the total interest rate differentials on government bonds between high yielders, namely Italy, Spain, Sweden and Germany. In particular we address the question of the relative importance of local and global factors in the...

This paper extends previous work on the information in the term structure at longer maturities to other countries besides the United states, using a newly constructed data set for 1 to 5 year interest rates from Britain, West Germany and Switzerland. Even with wide differences in inflation...

It is shown that the net fiscal externality created by an additional member of a pay-as-you-go pension system that is endowed with individual accounts equals the gross contributions" of this member. In Germany, this is an amount of about DM 175,000. The paper uses this" information to design a...