It is common practice to estimate the volatility-growth link by specifying a standard growth equation such that the variance of the error term appears as an explanatory variable in this growth equation. The variance in turn is modelled by a second equation. Hardly any of existing applications of...

We study optimal savings in continuous time with exogenous transitions between employment and unemployment as the only source of uncertainty in a small open economy. We prove the existence of an optimal consumption path. We exploit that the dynamics of consumption and wealth between jumps can be...

We study a small open economy displaying Pareto-distributed wealth resulting from random death. The government runs a distribution scheme on inheritance. We present the mathematical background that allows to study the dynamics of means. We end up with ordinary differential equations for the mean...

Many countries consider the lifting of restrictions of social contacts (RSC). We quantify the effects of RSC for Germany. We initially employ a purely statistical approach to predicting prevalence of COVID19 if RSC were upheld after April 20. We employ these findings and feed them into our...

Labour income follows a deterministic growth trend and fluctuates between two values. Interest rates are drawn initially, fluctuate between two values and can differ in their arrival rates. Low interest rates imply a stationary long-run wealth distribution, high interest rates imply exploding...

We model the evolution of the number of individuals that are reported to be sick with COVID-19 in Germany. Our theoretical framework builds on a continuous time Markov chain with four states: healthy without infection, sick, healthy after recovery or after infection but without symptoms and...

We use the synthetic control method to analyze the effect of face masks on the spread of COVID-19 in Germany. Our identification approach exploits regional variation in the point in time when wearing of face masks became mandatory in public transport and sales shops. Depending on the region we...

In this paper, we revisit the fiscal theory of the price level (FTPL) within the New Keynesian (NK) model. We show in which cases the average maturity of government debt matters for the transmission of policy shocks. The central task of this paper is to shed light on the theoretical predictions...

In this paper we use the property that certainty equivalence, as implied by a first-order approximation to the solution of stochastic discrete-time models, breaks in its equivalent continuous-time version. We study the extent to which a first-order approximated solution built by perturbation...

Cyclical components are analytically computed in a theoretical model of stochastic endogenous fluctuations and growth. Volatility is shown to depend on the speed of convergence of the cyclical component, the expected length of a cycle and on the altitude of the slump. Taxes affect these channels...