The economic meltdown since 2008-9 has created disinflation, and even deflation in some countries in the Euro-area, in a period with large debt overhang, creating the condition for a continuing financial market stress in the Euro-area. As disinflation and deflation push up the real interest...

The paper questions the reasonability of using forecast error variance decompositions for assessing the role of different structural shocks in business cycle fluctuations. It is shown that the forecast error variance decomposition is related to a dubious definition of the business cycle. A...

This paper provides new estimates of a timevarying NAIRU for Germany taking account of the structural break caused by German unification based on the Kalman Filter and on a partially linear model as two alternatives. Estimating a standard Phillips curve, the sum of coefficients associated with...

Virtually all empirical firm-level studies on the demand for labor do not include labor cost in the econometric specification. This is due to the fact that business and innovation survey data usually lack information on labor cost. This paper shows how reliable skill-specific and firm-specific...

Using linked employer-employee data, this study measures and decomposes the differences in the earnings distribution between male and female employees in Germany. I extend the traditional decomposition to disentangle the effect of human capital characteristics and the effect of firm...

This study analyzes energy intensity trends and drivers in 40 major economies using the WIOD database, a novel harmonized and consistent dataset of input-output table time series accompanied by environmental satellite data. We use logarithmic mean Divisia index decomposition to (1) study trends...

This paper suggests that exchange rates are related to economic fundamentals over medium-term horizons, such as a month or longer. We find from a large panel of individual professionals' forecasts that good exchange rate forecasts benefit from the proper understanding of fundamentals,...