This paper deals with the effects of labour market institutions on unemployment in a panel of 19 OECD countries for the period 1960 to 2003 In contrast to many other studies, we use long time series and analyze cyclically adjusted trend values of the unemployment rate. Our novel contribution is...

In the first part of the paper we look at economic growth in Africa over the past three decades. We divide the past three decades into two parts: A "lost period" from 1981 to 1995 and a "recovery period" since the second half of the 1990s. During the first period, Africa did not catch up but...

In this paper we use the Hodrick-Prescott filter for analyzing global temperature data. We are especially concerned with a reliable estimation of the trend component at the end of the data sample. To this end we employ time-varying values for the penalization parameter. The optimal values are...

The HP filter is the most popular filter for extracting the trend and cycle components from an observed time series. Many researchers consider the smoothing parameter λ = 1600 as something like an universal constant. It is well known that the HP filter is an optimal filter under some...

This paper presents a stress indicator for the eurozone that summarizes developments of trends and cycles in real GDP and inflation in the member countries. Stress in a country is defined as the difference between the country's actual short-term interest rate and the interest rate that would...

The concept of the "employment threshold" plays an important role in the public discussion of unemployment. The employment threshol d is defined as that growth rate of output which is necessary to keep employment constant despite the continuous rise in labour productivity. It is related to the...

This paper deals with the effects of labour market institutions on labour market performance. We analyse as an indicator for the labour intensity of output growth the employment threshold (the minimum growth rate of output necessary to keep employment constant). We show for a sample of 17 OECD...

This paper deals with the effects of labour market institutions on unemployment in a panel of 19 OECD countries for the period 1960 to 2000. In contrast to many other studies, we use long time series and analyze cyclically adjusted trend values of the unemployment rate. Our novel contribution is...

We examine the economic and social determinants of suicide mortality in a panel of 25 OECD countries over the period 1970 – 2011 and explicitly analyze the effects of unemployment and labor market institutions on suicide rates. In line with a large body of literature our results suggest that...

This paper analyses the effects of education signals for Ethnic Germans and Germans without a migration background (“Native Germans”). We base our analysis on a sorting model with productivity enhancing effects of education. We compare whether the signalling value differs between the...